First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Leslie Jamison about her new book, Splinters.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: It seems like because your work is so personal and you were talking earlier about the self that it can never really be erased or separated from these things you’re writing about, even if you’re not writing about yourself. And I’m curious how you emerged from this book, how maybe you think you might have changed either as a writer, or an individual, or mother, or fill in the blank, and if that was different from other books?

Leslie Jamison: Yeah, it’s a great question. This semester I’m thinking a lot about the self because I’m teaching a class called “The Self”.  I’ve taught at the Columbia MFA program for about a decade, and teaching is actually a really important subplot in Splinters as well. And about what teaching means to me and how much my students mean to me. So, I’m teaching a lecture class that’s really investigating this question of self-construction on the page. Self-construction as a literary act. And how a self is always actually 10,000 selves. Elizabeth Hardwick has this amazing quote, in her book, Sleepless Nights, which was kind of a godmother text for this book. And she says, we always dream of the self as something fossilized, but the self is actually many, many minnows who are wriggling around and swimming around and trembling to escape the net. And I love that vision of the self, it’s not one thing, it’s all these little creatures trying to be free. But it’s also the net that’s trying to keep them contained. All that to say, part of the way that this book changed me and writing this book changed me, is I think I went into writing this book, you know, because I started writing pieces of it four or five years ago, pretty close to the time of the events that were happening, you know, just writing little fragments and jotting things down. And I think at that time, I was still really kind of invested in my daughter, and myself as this dyad, as this little unit of two. I was really invested in the kind of pain I had felt that had been part of my experience, the dissolution of my marriage. And so, there was a little bit of that feeling of writing in that space of pure, pure pain and pure, sort of like ferocious, motherly, this is me and my child against the world kind of energy. And I think some of that energy remains in the text. You know, Maggie Smith, when she talks about her book, You Could Make this Place Beautiful, which is also about mothering, and also about the end of a marriage, she says there are many versions of this book, and some were written from a place of fire. And you can see traces of that fire still in this book. And I think that something similar is true for Splinters, that there are still traces of that fire in it. But I think my journey and writing the book, one of them was a journey away from that place of pure pain, and a total kind of identification and spirit melding with my daughter and towards a place of recognition of my ex-husband as this beautiful and necessary force and presence in her life and a kind of recognition of their bond. And that her story is not the story of the two of us. It’s a larger story and her experience of family deserves to be a larger thing. And so, I think there’s an opening.  There are these moments in the book where I turn on myself as a narrator around pronouns, like I’ll say, my daughter, my daughter, my daughter, and then I’ll turn towards our daughter.  And I think that that’s kind of one of the journeys that the book actually helped me on in figuring out how to tell the story of her early life, which is always only going to be, from my perspective, not from the perspective of the other people involved but that sort of turning to let more in and to understand that she needed so much more than just me, that she was made of so much more than just me, that her world was comprised of so much more than just me. So, there’s a kind of an opening and a loosening that I think, I hope, the book enacts but I know was important for me as a human being, writing the book to undergo.

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Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.   Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.