Katie Rothstein
Interview with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison composes paragraphs like melodies where each sentence harmonizes with the next; she drives her points home with the lyricism of a symphony hitting a crescendo. And while it is easy to get swept away in the beauty of Jamison’s prose, it is impossible to come away from reading her work unchanged.
She is the author of one novel, The Gin Closet (2010); two books of essays, including the New York Times–bestselling and Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize–winning The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019); and two additional works of nonfiction that hew closer to memoir, The Recovering (2018) and Splinters (2024). Yet across genre and format, Jamison remains committed to innovation. Part of this has to do with her approach to pursuing, in her words, “life as a maker.”
“Something feels wrong to me if I don’t feel like I’m attempting to do something that I’ve never done before,” Jamison said recently over coffee in Brooklyn. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, her most recent book, marks a bit of a departure for the author. Though most of her nonfiction work is personal, Splinters, for the most part, drops the references from outside voices and lets Jamison’s own inner monologue take center stage through a series of vignettes. Wearing delightfully pink translucent earrings shaped like jellyfish––a gift from a student––Jamison took us through the process of writing Splinters, how she handles feedback from people in her life who appear in her work, and the reason she tries to limit her screen time.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: I wanted to start off by asking you about Splinters. It is different from your earlier work, which has been described as es- says and criticism braided with personal narrative. What was it like to take that leap and go directly to memoir?
LESLIE JAMISON: Splinters almost immediately presented itself as a project with a texture different from anything I’d written: utterly proximate. Very close to my own subjectivity, my own life, my own body, my own sensory aware- ness and daily lived experience, built of these sharply distilled vignettes. I was excited by the newness of this texture, which always felt inseparable from the form: these sharp, tender, fragmented splinters. Hence the title. In that sense, the project’s mode of inquiry, drawing from personal lived experience, always felt entwined with its form. These whittled shards. It was a formal discovery as much as a methodological discovery.
In writing a narrative that was more wholly personal than most of my previous work, it wasn’t that I wanted to leave the rest of the world behind—I just wanted a reader to encounter it through my body, my gaze. I wanted to create an experience of total proximity. Certain questions about beauty feel essential to the project: How does art become part of navigating sorrow? How does art become part of surviving personal crisis? But these are questions that demanded I write about art through my life, through my body, through my crisis. For this project, I wasn’t going to write criticism that felt formally or vocally distinct from the personal narration; the criticism is what I think of as embodied criticism. Which is to say, I’m not switching into the voice of a disembodied narrator to write about Judy Chicago or Wendy Red Star or Donald Judd or Gary Winogrand. I’m actually going to live inside this narrator, who’s been born as a presence across these pages, to show you what it felt like to experience this painting as I was breastfeeding my daughter in front of it, or to tell you what it was like to think about Judy Chicago’s identity as a non-mother as I’m compulsively walking a stroller around The Dinner Party again and again and again, because if I stop the stroller my daughter’s going to wake up.
WSR: I love the way you describe it as a formal choice, rather than a genre choice, because I feel like so many people see memoir as a monolith, and it’s just not.
LJ: I think personal narration gets misunderstood—or reductively understood— in a thousand different ways. The literary properties of memoir are so often forgotten or overshadowed by its content properties. It’s often a genre that’s thought about less in terms of craft and form and structure and experiment. Instead, when people think and talk about memoirs, it’s almost as if the craft of the memoir is just a straight, transparent delivery mechanism for the content: How can you bullet point this person’s life experiences? What about those life experiences makes them extraordinary, worth narrating? How much have they suffered? Have they suffered enough to earn the rights to write a memoir? Have they been kidnapped? Have they been a president or a prince? Essentially, what’s the resume here—in terms of either trauma or fame—that would make this life special enough to deserve a story?
Which is just a totally different way of thinking about what might give literature value than the metrics that we bring to literary fiction, for example. Was Ulysses a worthwhile novel because Leopold Bloom led an extraordinary life? Of course not. Actually, the ordinariness of his character is part of where profundity lives in that novel. What are the things that make that novel interesting as a novel––it’s not about form as a delivery mechanism for content, it’s about form as part of the point. The questions a critic might naturally bring to a literary novel about an “ordinary” person are questions about literary craft that I wish were brought more frequently to personal narrative: How does language express consciousness? How are relationships evoked in interesting ways on the page? How is the noticing eye brought into relation to the analytic brain and the feeling heart on the page?
Craft is just as operative for memoir as it is for the novel. The only difference is, are you drawing on an imagined set of experiences that you’ve invented for a character, or are you drawing on a set of experiences that you have already lived? But that’s just about the source, the origins of the material. Once you are working with that source material, so many craft choices are shared: reckoning with language and syntax and form and structure and the quality of insight and the kinds of questions you’re asking. But with memoir, that part of the process is diminished or forgotten. That’s why personal writing is often seen as less ambitious. But often that denigration of its ambition is simply a failure to see its craft: the many formal and tonal choices, for example, that might make a narrative feel “honest” or “raw.”
WSR: How does your process differ for writing fiction versus nonfiction, if it differs at all?
LJ: It totally differs, insofar as my process is different for every project (whatever the genre) but at the same time there are definitely continuities between how I write fiction and nonfiction. Whether I’m inventing narrative or drawing it from my own life (or someone else’s, in my reported work), I’m always interested in writing that’s very specific and granular and sensory and embodied and lushly populated. I’m always interested in subjectivity and consciousness and interior life––again, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I think deep interiority is always one of my core gravitational draws. Connected to that, writing relation- ships, writing intimacy, writing not just consciousness and isolation, but what happens when consciousness tries to connect to or understand other conscious- nesses—all of those are dynamics that I’m drawn to, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction.
That said, the process also feels importantly different. I’m working on a novel again for the first time in forever, and I’m so struck by the fact that the axes along which I can revise feel more expansive in fiction than nonfiction. (I can change the plot!) With nonfiction, I revise quite a bit—I certainly revised Splinters quite a bit, draft to draft—but I wasn’t revising what happened. I was revising how I was telling it, and there’s a lot to revise in that––everything is about how you say it, what you choose, what belongs, what doesn’t belong, what you didn’t explore and can explore more fully, all that stuff. But it feels like adding another dimension to be like, ‘Oh, when I revise this novel draft, I can make things happen another way. I can play God in that sense. I can make these two characters have a conflict where they didn’t have a conflict before.’
While the ideas and the questions that I find myself exploring feel very continuous across fiction and nonfiction, the materials I get to use in exploring them and how far flung those materials are from my own experience varies so much. The novel I’m working on right now, for example, starts in myth. It starts in ancient Crete, it starts with the story of the Minotaur. It actually focuses on the story of the Minotaur’s mother: how she gives birth to a monster, loves him anyway, sends him into the darkness of a labyrinth. So there’s a whole propulsive energy that comes from summoning not just an utterly different world than anything I’ve ever lived, but even a different register of expression, a non-realist register of expression. But within that universe that feels so far away, so many of the concerns that I’m thinking about are like, what does motherhood feel like? What does it feel like to abandon somebody who you love? What does it feel like to be drawn or kept torn between a consuming love and a deep hunger for freedom? How fully can one ever imagine another consciousness? All of these questions are questions I’ve been asking for decades, but I’m asking them in the context of a stone labyrinth in ancient Crete. So there’s both a lot of continuity and also a kind of wild travel.
WSR: I’m curious what you think about how to handle––when you are writing nonfiction––other people reading your words about them. Have you ever had someone disagree with something that you’ve published about them, and how do you navigate that?
LJ: I have so much to say about this! I have a whole process around it. Part of that process is intrinsic to the actual craft of the manuscript, and part of it has to do with what happens outside the manuscript. Inside the manuscript, I am always operating from the premise that personal narrative is something different from journalism insofar as it’s not trying to see a situation from every perspective. It’s told from inside a subjectivity, a particular point of view, and that’s part of the understanding between an author and a reader––this isn’t everybody’s version of what happened, this is one person’s version of what happened. It’s not the same as fact-checked journalism, and it’s not the same as an account that’s interviewed everyone––and those have value too, they’re just a different thing. I start from the idea that there’s value in an account told from a particular subjectivity. Within that, I’m interested in how every character on the page can have as much complexity as possible. How can I write other people in a way that tries to resist my totalizing or reductive thesis statements about them?
At the event I did with Darin [Strauss at NYU this spring], he quoted Saul Bellow, on how it’s a good idea to prosecute yourself and defend your enemies. I’m probably paraphrasing it badly, but it speaks to the same impulse I’m trying to describe: to make sure that when I’m writing other people as characters on the page, that I’m letting them be a lot of different ways at once, letting them have a lot of different layers. That’s what I feel like I owe them most of all, that kind of complexity and multiplicity and depth, rather than owing them a sanitized or psychologically-Photoshopped version of themselves on the page. So I try to really write into complexity. That’s the work that happens inside the manuscript.
Part of my practice––and every writer has a different practice around this, and I don’t think there’s only one right practice to have––but I always offer to share manuscripts with everybody who appears in them. I don’t assume that everyone wants to engage, but usually they do, and so we go through a process where I share the manuscript, usually at least a year in advance of publication (sometimes with a magazine piece, it’s not that kind of timescale). I don’t prom- ise anything you don’t like, I’ll take out; anything you remember differently, I’ll shift to your recollection rather than my own; but I do promise to edit with their response in mind, and I always do. I always end up changing some things, even if I don’t change everything.
Sharing the manuscript with everyone who appears in it is part of how I approach the ethics of writing about other people. I don’t live in a fantasy world; it’s not that I believe I can make everyone happy. But sharing a manuscript feels very different to me than not giving people any kind of voice in the process. I think sometimes there can be a black-and-white, all-or-nothing way that this dilemma is rendered, where either you take the position of ‘All is justified in making art, fuck what other people think, it’s your right to just tell the story,’ or you can occupy almost the opposite position, which is, ‘It’s kind of intrinsically violent and unethical to tell any part of another person’s experience,’ that overly vilifies the act of writing. I think in a way both of those takes avoid a messier and more involved process––what if you actually invite other people into this process in some way? So that’s the third road that I try to take.
Those conversations have gone so many different ways. One thing that I can say is consistent across them is that I am never able to perfectly predict what somebody’s response to a manuscript is going to be. It’s a kind of hubris to imagine that I would know what would upset them or what wouldn’t upset them and could thus preemptively avoid the things that would upset them. So I’ve come to this process instead. Rather than pretending like I know everything, let me just do the scarier thing and let them tell me what they really think. There’s a humility I’ve learned from that process that I actually try to bring back to my life, which is, instead of thinking I can anticipate what somebody’s going to think about something I’ve done or something I’ve said, I just need to let them tell me what they think about it.
Sometimes you reach a true moment of divergence, where my memory of how something happened is just different from how somebody else remembers it. And in certain cases, I’ll take it out. In other cases, I’ll say, ‘Well, this is how I remember it, and that’s the account I’m presenting.’ And in other cases, I’ll say, ‘You know what? Maybe you do remember this better than I do,’ and I’ll allow their version to be the version that stands.
In The Recovering, for example, there’s a relationship with my ex, Dave, that’s a core narrative across the course of that book, and Dave read actually two different versions of the manuscript and gave me quite extensive notes on them. I think that the account of our relationship, rather than getting shackled or strait- jacketed by his editorial responses, actually became deeper and more nuanced because of his feedback. For example, in the margins of one passage he wrote, ‘Maybe in this moment you felt like I had no tolerance for your vulnerability or your pain or only wanted the version of you that was strong or charming or together, but actually I felt almost the opposite. I felt like I endlessly tried to be present for your vulnerability, and that loving you felt like pouring my love down a drain. It was like there was never enough of it, you know?’ Now there’s a line in the book that says something like, ‘Dave felt like loving me was like pouring his love down a fucking drain.’
Again, without pretending a memoir is telling everything from everybody’s point of view, I think it can be powerful to introduce moments where the text is able to see around its first person narrator, either through dialogue––somebody says something that points out a blind spot in the narrator––or through the presence of the retrospective narrator, who’s different from the narrator as a character, and can see a bit more of how others might have felt. In that moment in The Recovering, for example, you’re with me as a character who’s feeling like my vulnerable self is repulsive to my partner, they only want a version of me that’s strong; but the retrospective narrator is able to say, ‘As I was feeling that way, Dave was simultaneously feeling like no matter how much love he gave me, it would never be enough.’ And so the retrospective narrator can offer that awareness, ‘Here’s how cloistered my perspective was in this moment.’
So often these extra-textual conversations allow the book to have a richness that it couldn’t have had otherwise. Which I think is important to say explicitly, because sometimes there can be a fear that letting other people into the process is always just going to infringe on your artistic freedom, that they’re going to become censors, essentially holding up their defensive red pens and saying, ‘Well, this hurts me and that hurts me and take this out and take that out,’ and that the text will end up as a stick figure with all of its limbs chopped off. Sometimes that tension comes up, but I’ve found there are other ways that the text can actually become more fully itself, more layered and complex, through that process of talking about it with other people.
WSR: I’m really interested in the relationship between the internet and personal narrative, and how the internet, for better or worse, has awakened us to our fascination with other people’s lives. I think at the same time, that has made more space for memoir and creative nonfiction in a positive way. I read in a recent New York Times article that you have “internet-free writing days.” Is that something you have always done, or something you recently instituted for yourself?
LJ: The first thing I need to say about my internet-free days is that they are partial and very aspirational! Usually the logistical demands of life mean that I have to get online more than I’d wanted or planned, but I do try, on certain days, to say: Okay, I’m not going to get online until 1pm today, or something like that.
To give myself a time horizon. It’s a way of trying to build up a tiny little muscle inside myself that is constantly getting atrophied by the availability of these small distractions: Checking my inbox. Checking twitter (I’ll never think of it as X). When I’m trying to settle into a piece of difficult or demanding writing, I can feel myself looking for tiny little escape hatches: I want a snack, I want another cup of coffee, I need to pick up the laundry from the dryer, fold it. And when you’re near a screen, there are a thousand of these little temptations, ‘Well, I can check Twitter, I can check my email, or maybe there’s an email that I desperately need to respond to, or maybe somebody texted me.’ I’m fully aware that the high traffic, high contact rhythms of the internet offer immediate gratifications––not just the gratification of “how many likes did this tweet get?” but even just the gratification of getting something done, crossing a task off a list, and usually spending forty seconds writing an email gives me the feeling of having “gotten something done” faster than reckoning with a major structural problem in a piece of writing.
Look, let me be honest: I go through phases where I’m very far away from having these doses of internet-free time. And then it gets harder for me to manage at all. I think this is pretty scientifically proven too, that the more time you spend on screens the harder it is to stay focused away from them. Whenever I have a book out, I’m a bit of a fallen angel in this regard: too screen-bound, addicted to my inbox. So right now, a few months after publishing Splinters, I’m in this season of trying to build back those better rhythms where I have some more boundaries around my relationship to the internet.
I’ve been sober for almost fourteen years, and honestly, men and Twitter are the things that make me feel closest to my old alcoholic self. The compulsive relationship to the dopamine hit of likes, for example—it really reminds me of that kind of bottomless craving I brought to drinking. The ways I struggle with the internet feel both degraded and profound: it forces me to face the same compulsive tendencies I describe in Splinters at one point, when I say that the only thing I’ve ever written about is the great bottomless hole inside that I’ve tried to fill with booze and sex and even motherhood. Sometimes I feel like even just casually scrolling the internet means I’m brushing up against the inner void… the feeling of needing something.
And of course I bring this cathected struggle with screens to raising my daughter, who is six. My mom––who’s my guru––always told me, ‘Kids don’t do what they’re told, they do what they see,’ and I think it’s true. If you’re constantly showing a kid that what it means to be a human being is to be constantly pulling this thing out of your pocket and engaging with it more than you engage with other human beings, it’s just a frightening thing to model. So I don’t just try to limit my daughter’s relationship to screens, I try (partially and imperfectly!) to limit my own relationship to screens around her. She’s this beautifully playful, incredibly imaginative person—literally, her favorite thing to do is run around the living room acting out some elaborately imagined play scenario—and I feel like if I don’t do my job right, then her relationship to screens will take this away from her. It’s my job to protect this thing that she’s naturally capable of. Which is all to say: I definitely get a sense of righteous moral calling around her relationship to screens, even if I’m sort of fucked like the rest of us.
WSR: It’s so much about learning to be bored and learning to sit with yourself. It freaks me out a lot too, just in terms of the future of creativity. You cannot be creative if you’re constantly going on Twitter, you have to be super mindful about putting limits on these things.
LJ: Sometimes it does feel like as a parent, I get more access to my own inner life if I’m cutting off her ability to tap into her own inner life, because sometimes putting her in front of a screen is the way to get more freedom, right? But it feels like a devil’s bargain. It’s easy to be melodramatic about parenting in that way––this tiny choice that I’m making is basically determining my child’s entire future and happiness. It’s never true in that grand unequivocal way, but it’s sort of also always true. Collectively, those choices do add up to a lot. They add up to a childhood.
It’s another kind of terrifying humility: just like I’m never able to predict exactly how someone will respond to a manuscript, I think there’s something similar about the way that I actually don’t know what are going to be the crucially formative moments from my daughter’s childhood. What are going to be the moments that become an important part of her narrative of her own experience? Of course, I can say, ‘I hope it’s this moment where we made a puppet show together,’ but it’s probably going to be this other moment where I was like, ‘Mama has to write an email,’ and then she’s going to remember that as the defining moment of her life. We don’t get to know all the things that matter in the shaping of this little self.
WSR: Do you think about what it will be like when your daughter is old enough to read your work? How do you approach that?
LJ: Splinters is the only one of my books in which she features. Make It Scream, Make It Burn ends right when she’s born. With her birth. When I think about her someday reading Splinters, I would say I bring both humility and hope. She might not even want to read it! If she does choose to read it, I can’t know what she’ll make of it. But I hope that she experiences it as this intense love letter to her, which is how I experienced it. I feel so fundamentally transformed by her that I think of the book also as not just a love letter or an ode, but also a letter of gratitude for all the transformation she catalyzed in me.
When I thought about how I was writing the character of C (her dad) on the page, I was absolutely thinking about a lot of the things I was talking about ear- lier––believing and granting everybody the dignity of complexity (he also read the book well before it was published, so we went through a version of that process together)––but I also was really thinking about her. If she reads the book someday, I want her to see her father as a character in the book who loves her so fiercely, and is so devoted to her, and as a parental figure with whom she shares deep connection and deep joy.
At a certain point, she’ll be old enough that I can share work with her, especially work in which she appears. At this point, she’s too young, she can’t read a manuscript or tell me what she thinks of it––but at a certain point she will be able to. Although I imagine she might have a special veto power that I don’t give everybody. She didn’t ask to be my kid, she just drew that lot.
WSR: As you were talking, I was thinking about––would I want to read my own mom’s memoir? I’ve never thought about it. I don’t know if I would.
LJ: I mean, I definitely would, but I’m just endlessly curious about people’s inner lives. There’s no part of me that’s averse to seeing my parents in flawed and human terms. Actually, at a certain point I got to do a version of this: my mom’s first husband wrote an unpublished novel about their marriage and separation. When I found out that this manuscript existed, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to get my hands on it.’ And I did, I read it. I actually wrote an essay about it, because I’m me—the essay was part literary criticism of that unpublished novel, and also part family journalism, where I did all these interviews with my mom and with her first husband. I was interested in how they remember the same things differently. So I would read my mom’s memoir in a heartbeat, but I also know that it’s definitely not how everybody operates.
WSR: What are you reading right now?
LJ: I’m reading Helen Garner’s diaries. They are so dynamic and varied, pivoting from interior rumination to exterior observation, from psychoanalysis to the moon over Bondi Beach, these short fragments that have so much propulsive force: helping her daughter with a drawing, loving other women’s naked bodies at a bathhouse, having a blowout fight with her partner about whether she’ll write about their personal lives… Her view of human nature is so nuanced and unprecious. She’s allergic to moral righteousness. Lots of writers have published diaries, but Garner has actually published her diaries while she’s still alive—they’re already out in Australia. I’m writing an introduction to the American edition, and one of the things I’ve appreciated most about reading them is their faith in the importance of daily life, the kinds of small moments and details that people might dismiss as insignificant. It’s like they articulate the same kind of faith I was carrying into writing Splinters; like they offer the mantra I didn’t even know I needed as I was writing it: that everyday experience holds everything that matters.