
Splinters
Another Kind of Love Story
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Narrated by:
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Leslie Jamison
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By:
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Leslie Jamison
About this listen
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm.
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last word. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).
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Critic reviews
“Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title—a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life. If I were offered one guide as a writer, as a mother, as a teacher, as a human being constantly reinventing herself out of necessity, I’d want that guide to be Leslie Jamison. This memoir is a masterclass.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“In Splinters, Jamison offers a riveting portrait of rupture that is at once a page-turner about divorce, a romance about parenthood, a mystery of self after splintering, and a promise that however many times we break or are broken, art and love will never fail to mend us.”—Melissa Febos, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and national bestseller Girlhood
Editorial Review
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Story
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
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Probably better to read in physical form
- By harrison brinner on 05-08-25
By: Haley Mlotek
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More: A Memoir of Open Marriage
- By: Molly Roden Winter
- Narrated by: Molly Roden Winter
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Molly Roden Winter was a mother of small children with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime—again—she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At a bar, she met Matt, a flirtatious younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that Stewart encouraged her to accept.
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engaging but contradictory
- By Eyal Goldshmid on 03-15-24
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Grief Is for People
- By: Sloane Crosley
- Narrated by: Sloane Crosley
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
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Beautiful
- By MS on 03-03-24
By: Sloane Crosley
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Peggy
- A Novel
- By: Rebecca Godfrey, Leslie Jamison
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Leslie Jamison
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman. Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic.
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Unfortunate listening experience
- By Brenda D'Andre on 12-27-24
By: Rebecca Godfrey, and others
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Lifeform
- By: Jenny Slate
- Narrated by: Jenny Slate, George Saunders, Vanessa Bayer, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury.
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Untethered
- By MyronK on 12-20-24
By: Jenny Slate
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Never Simple
- A Memoir
- By: Liz Scheier
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Scheier’s mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn’t look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and—when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued every day of her life—a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best. On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things.
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Fine
- By Rae Rae’s Travels on 03-21-22
By: Liz Scheier
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Sucker Punch
- Essays
- By: Scaachi Koul
- Narrated by: Scaachi Koul
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her biting wit to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress.
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Vulnerable yet funny and so so relatable!
- By Diana on 03-14-25
By: Scaachi Koul
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Us, After
- A Memoir of Love and Suicide
- By: Rachel Zimmerman
- Narrated by: Rachel Zimmerman
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman’s door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could the man she’d married, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him? A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers, and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived.
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There’s no “good suicide”
- By Amazon Customer on 07-05-24
By: Rachel Zimmerman
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The Float Test
- A Novel
- By: Lynn Steger Strong
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters’ friends. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other.
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Tolstoy was wrong
- By tallybroom on 06-01-25
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My Fair Junkie
- A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean
- By: Amy Dresner
- Narrated by: Amy Dresner
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, Amy Dresner's My Fair Junkie is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest memoir of one woman's battle with all forms of addiction, hitting rock bottom, and forging a path to a life worth living.
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if you don't read this I'll brandish a bread knife
- By Jackie Lange on 03-02-18
By: Amy Dresner
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You Could Make This Place Beautiful
- A Memoir
- By: Maggie Smith
- Narrated by: Maggie Smith
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.
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Beautiful, relatable, profound
- By Betty Blue on 04-16-23
By: Maggie Smith
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The First Bad Man
- A Novel
- By: Miranda July
- Narrated by: Miranda July
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense nonprofit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.
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Yes, yes, yes.
- By Jo on 02-03-15
By: Miranda July
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The Marriage Portrait
- A Novel
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt, Maggie O'Farrell
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and to devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding, Lucrezia is thrust into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf. Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must make her way in a court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed.
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If You Love Alternate Histories, Get This
- By Jim on 09-26-22
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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All Fours
- A Novel
- By: Miranda July
- Narrated by: Miranda July
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.
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would not recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-24
By: Miranda July
A book every daughter should read.
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A wonderful and captivating story
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Tell us the rest of the story in 10 years Leslie, I want to know how you keep growing.
Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
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Hope after divorce
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Excellent writing that draws you in
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Tedious but true
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She often wonders of others in the book (her lover, friends, parents) “why are you telling me this” and I found myself asking the same. I’d hoped the splintering would sharpen moments and memories, instead it felt repetitive by the end. Her walking into the ocean in the dress with a lover just felt too “made for an essay.” I believe her but she’s the author you cried “this is symbolic” one too many times. For such an intimate book, I was surprised by how I felt more removed from its narrator at the end.
This seems like a book for those in certain literary/academic subset who know the backstory and all its players.
Wanted to love it. Didn’t.
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Masterful writing
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Tedious
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Felt seen
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