US writer Leslie Jamison anatomises her broken marriage in candid new memoir - but who or what was really to blame?
Historically, memoirs have typically been end-of-life recollections of an individual’s place in the tide of world events. Many contemporary international writers of autobiographical fiction carry on that tradition, braiding the intimate details of their lives with the revolutionary arcs of their times.
But there are some memoirists whose gaze faces solipsistically inwards, leading to a naked evisceration of the self. These writers are often quite young and their stories frequently concern recovery from addictions, eating disorders, dysfunctional families, lack of privilege or too much privilege, bigotry, abuse, bouts of severe depression and grappling with incurable illness. Their wars are not experienced on the battlefield but within themselves. There is no shame, no detail too graphic nor too personal to excavate as they struggle with their own Scylla and Charybdis until their personal demons are wrestled to defeat.
In the past, these struggles were often documented in such fictional explorations as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Today, such interior odysseys have emerged from the veil of fiction to be written as memoirs. Unlike autobiographies, which are usually written in chronological order and emphasise facts and historical events, memoirs cover specific episodes or situations, emphasising emotional experience and interiority. They are much more impressionistic and employ time in creative ways. This free lyricism allows authors the freedom of speculation and emotional elasticity, giving their accounts an air of novelistic invention.
Leslie Jamison’s third book, the “critical” memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, falls into this memoir category. Published in 2018, it was termed an “unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism”, combining Jamison’s own experience of drinking and sobriety with a survey of others struggling with similar demons. A gorgeous writer, her first publication and only novel was The Gin Closet, a heavy tale of two deeply hurt women. Jamison’s second book, The Empathy Exams, brought her to national attention as it utilised her experience of empathy with a keen journalistic investigation of the empathetic impulses of others. She followed that with another essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn.
In Splinters, she employs a similar eviscerating self-exploration. As the New Yorker put it, a single-line pitch to the book might be: “The birth of my daughter and the death of my marriage”. Divided into three sections: Milk/Smoke/Fever, Splinters recounts Jamison’s heady romance with a renowned novelist she calls “C”, a tattooed widower and solo parent in his mid-40s, 15 years her senior, whose first wife died after a protracted, brave battle with leukemia. They marry after six ecstatic months, eloping at a Las Vegas wedding chapel as the city is C’s hometown, the pair picking out wedding rings at his mother’s pawn shop. The marriage lasted five years, four of which were spent in couples therapy.
C’s first novel was a hit, but his second, a semi-autobiographical account of his first marriage, was not. Meanwhile, Jamison’s essay collection, The Empathy Exams, was a breakout success; her books prompted multi-city tours. C attempted to handle his wife’s success graciously but she also repeats him saying before a party, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there holding your purse!”
The spectre of C’s dead wife “nestled into every moment between us”. Like Princess Diana’s famous quip, “there were three of us in this marriage”, Jamison insinuates that there were three in hers – C, herself and the ghost of his first wife. ‘’It was the house we lived in.”
Ultimately, it is Jamison who leaves the marriage, their 13-month-old child in tow, moving into a dark apartment in Brooklyn beside a fire station. Her mother comes from California to live with her, and “our three bodies composed a single hydraulic system”.
A child of divorce, Jamison was the youngest of three and the only girl. Although her parents remained married for 22 years, they lived on opposite coasts, her father engaging in numerous affairs. But they stayed together because her mother “loved his mind, his wit, his commitment to work they both believed in … and with her father, her mother was never bored”. Jamison says that “when I was a kid, I liked to write fairy tales with unhappy endings”. It seems inevitable that she would leave her marriage to recreate the female hydraulic system that marked her own childhood. The world at home was her and her mother alone. And so Splinters is the fairy tale with an unhappy ending.
But, for me, it was not the loss of love that led to the collapse of the marital union, but the war between the pair’s competing desires and fiery ambitions. Jamison’s ambition is so powerful, it seems to be its own addiction. She reflects: “If I failed at happiness, success seemed like a consolation prize. And if writing was my great love, and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man could be – I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison – becoming a wife and then a mother, was precisely the antivenom needed.”
Her selfless love for her daughter thus balances her desire for fame, acclaim and recognition.
The narrative is underscored by tremors of guilt. “After leaving my marriage, I felt for the first time such deep shame,” she writes. Yet she seems to crave that pain as a form of self-punishment. She declares she could no longer live with her husband’s anger, his way of concealing his grief, yet she admires C “seeing through the performances of mine that impressed everyone else … there was something electrifying, even erotic, about the experience of being seen through, like an X-ray … Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.”
One can understand why Jamison could no longer live with her husband’s taunting anger, but there is little acknowledgement of the unconscious provocations that led to C’s mean outbursts. Successful marriages demand uncomfortable compromises, and Jamison seems unwilling and unable to mediate her swelling ambition in deference to her husband’s aching sense of failure after the disappointing performance of his second book.
Splinters goes on to tell the story of Jamison’s post-marital love affair with a musician she calls the “tumbleweed” because he can never stay in one place, which is then followed by a lover who is a sleek financier and former academic who lives in a literal glass tower and has the audacity to dump her. Jamison has never been dumped.
And so the fairy tale resolves with another unhappy ending: her alone with her daughter and her unrivalled ambition – although in reality she is not alone, rather she has a new partner and is still travelling the world, publicising her lauded writing.
In the end, with whom does our empathy lie? Are our sympathies forever splintered? Is Jamison liberated by her divorce or tethered by guilt? This memoir, like most memoirs, is her story, not their story. Given he is a successful writer, it might be fascinating to read C’s side of the saga.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison (Granta, $39.99) is out now.
