
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
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- By: Cindy Lee Neighbors MD
- Narrated by: Rachael Doolen
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In TOO MUCH, a young woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery and resilience as she navigates the challenges of mental health, addiction, and systemic dysfunction within the demanding field of military medicine. From the sunny shores of Honolulu to the sterile halls of military hospitals, Cindy Lee Neighbors' life takes an unexpected turn as she grapples with the complexities of trauma, addiction, and a system that seems designed to break her.
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Unmasking the Ideal
- By Logan Hyde on 03-21-25
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No Fault
- A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
- By: Haley Mlotek
- Narrated by: Haley Mlotek
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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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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When we are divorced, it is still happening.
- By Anonymous User on 03-29-25
By: Haley Mlotek
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This American Ex-Wife
- How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
- By: Lyz Lenz
- Narrated by: Lyz Lenz
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. We’ve all seen how the media portrays divorcées: sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine. Lyz Lenz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. But she refused to take part in that tired narrative and decided to flip the script on divorce.
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Someone Needed To Write This
- By Laurie on 03-03-24
By: Lyz Lenz
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
- One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
- By: Glynnis MacNicol
- Narrated by: Glynnis MacNicol
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets. After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it.
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Sentence structure; descriptions
- By Marlette Hoxmeier on 07-02-24
By: Glynnis MacNicol
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Consent
- A Memoir
- By: Jill Ciment
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Excellent writing; overworked main question
- By Eric A. Ruthford on 06-18-24
By: Jill Ciment
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Truly
- By: Lionel Richie
- Narrated by: Lionel Richie, Blair Underwood
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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As a storyteller second to none, Lionel Richie is ready to tell it all. In this intimate, deeply candid memoir, Lionel revisits hilarious and harrowing events to inspire all who doubt themselves or feel their dreams don’t matter. Lionel chronicles lessons learned during his unlikely story of remarkable success—his dramatic transformation from painfully shy, “tragically” late bloomer to world-class entertainer and composer of love songs that have played as the soundtrack of our lives.
By: Lionel Richie
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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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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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A Clean Mess
- A Memoir of Sobriety After a Lifetime of Being Numb
- By: Tiffany Jenkins
- Narrated by: Tiffany Jenkins
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Told with humor and honesty, A Clean Mess is Tiffany Jenkins’s story of how she learned to live and feel for the first time without numbing herself with drugs—and how she discovered inner reserves of strength she didn’t know she had. From her tentative first days of sobriety, to seeing two pink lines on a pregnancy test weeks later, to navigating anxiety, a new marriage, and motherhood at the same time, to surviving betrayal and divorce, Jenkins shows how she got through it all when her crutches and Band-Aids were taken away from her.
By: Tiffany Jenkins
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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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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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Sucker Punch
- Essays
- By: Scaachi Koul
- Narrated by: Scaachi Koul
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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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
What listeners say about Splinters
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- Matches don’t light!
- 12-28-24
A book every daughter should read.
The author’s description of a mother’s love for her child, especially a daughter, reminded me of all the feelings I had when my daughter was brand new. I loved the best of the author’s mother and how the love connected all three main characters. Much of the despair of divorce and how it impacts a family was beautifully described. The book was poetic. Very much liked the author’s narration. It was a tad/long redundant by the end, but, but still worth reading or listening.
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- Madeline
- 02-27-24
A wonderful and captivating story
This couldn’t have spoken to me more. The narration is nice and it’s a pleasant listen.
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- Kristin H
- 09-27-24
Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
Look, I’m a mother of a 2 yr old going through a divorce with her father. In many ways this book spoke to me about depths of feeling that made me feel less alone. But by the end, I felt the deadline for the draft to be done - the entire last hour and a half of this book is useless repetition of the rest of it. It feels like a story trying too hard to come to conclusions it’s not yet ready to make. There isn’t enough vulnerability or self discovery evident yet to really be affected by the work emotionally. I wouldn’t recommend unless you are literally going through a divorce with a toddler.
Tell us the rest of the story in 10 years Leslie, I want to know how you keep growing.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Katie H
- 05-14-24
Hope after divorce
Read well, but The story was too repetitive for me. Prefer more depth and growth.
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- Pony2018
- 03-13-24
Excellent writing that draws you in
This book caught my attention through the very beginning. The story is written in a raw, very honest or transparent manner.
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- evan
- 08-21-24
Tedious but true
Once she reviled the writing technique she tells her students, I could not unhear it in this book itself. Prepare for many college workshop similes. It’s infuriating to listen to her make so many poor judgement calls but you have to appreciate her level of candor and also my frustration probably also indicates an investment in the character, which signifies a win for the author.
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- Amanda Long
- 03-19-24
Wanted to love it. Didn’t.
Liked her specificity. Her details. But how many times can we smell her baby’s (breath, shit, food) etc, and hear about the fire trucks next door? The tension between her guilt and pleasure felt stretched too thin by the 20th metaphor about it. I really, really wanted to like it because I imagine the effort it took to excavate such painful memories that aren’t even memories yet. And I do love her sentences, so exquisitely constructed. But, so many anecdotes felt forced and made for highlighting in one of her classes.
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.
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- Natalie Bovis
- 04-05-24
Masterful writing
Beautiful use of words. I liked the story but even more than that, I thought the writing itself was wonderful.
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- Barb
- 07-13-24
Tedious
Beautiful prose but tedious story. Couldn’t wait for it to end. I just decided to stick it out.
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- Placeholder
- 01-06-25
Felt seen
Beautifully written. I found myself speaking out loud “ yes!” to no one at all. A book that helped me feel seen. Wonderful.
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