I’ll read anything Leslie Jamison writes. Her memoir Splinters, about the implosion of her marriage and the love of her daughter, is as just engaging as her other writing. Many wonderful insights and sentences. My highlights from Kindle below. All bolding is my own.
[On the intensity of early love] Every morning we ate breakfast at a little diner down the road. The coffee was mulchy and bitter and hot, but I drank cup after cup, burned my tongue on it—eager to be awake, eager to talk, eager to bite the salty bacon that made my chapped lips sting; eager to rush back to the table from the little diner bathroom because there was so much to say.
Those early days with my daughter felt like excess and hallucination. It was all too much, but when I tried to find language for it, it was nothing at all: milk and diapers, milk and diapers, milk and diapers. The astonishing revelations of caring for a baby felt shameful to claim as astonishing, or—honestly—as revelations at all. Attachment bathes every common thing in the glow of false remarkability. My love-drunk gaze made it impossible to see if anything was worth seeing.
In its best moments, writing made me feel like I was touching something larger than myself. During those early days with the baby, however, it was hard to feel that I was contacting anything larger than my home or my child—anything larger than I could see the edges of. Now that I could not hurl myself constantly into work and trips and teaching and deadlines, I had to look more closely at the life I’d built: this husband, this marriage.
C saw right through the performances of mine that impressed everyone else. He was a keen but tender observer of other people’s coping strategies and blustering compensations. Listening to me do a radio interview, he could tell I was nervous because I was speaking too quickly. There was something electrifying, even erotic, about the experience of being seen through. The X-ray.
Years later, he told me that even though I’d managed to convince the world I was a good person, he knew what lay behind this façade: the selfishness underpinning my ambition, the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue. Some part of me believed him. Some part of me would always believe him. Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.
During our four years together, we broke up, got back together, broke up again. We moved, moved again, moved out, moved in, more or less, again. We fought. We made up. We fought. We made up. I drank. I stopped drinking. I started drinking again. I stopped drinking again. We moved back and forth between conflict and reconciliation. Always in transit. Somehow we felt most present to each other in that passage across the threshold.
I was a teenager—and already angry at him in ways I couldn’t quite name, for distances I’d grown so acclimated to I didn’t even realize how badly I didn’t want them. I bristled with indignation and a blind, molten fury that I told myself was on my mother’s behalf. And it was. But it was also on behalf of that little girl who’d been part of the home he left behind, and—though I didn’t know this yet—on behalf of the woman I would become, who recognized some version of his restlessness in herself, and wished he’d given her a different model for how to navigate it.
I didn’t ask why his day had been so bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers. I said none of this to him—just, “Our day was great,” and let him read my tone however he wanted.
I came to hold both truths at once: I’d caused him deep and lasting harm, by leaving him. And also, I did not regret choosing a life that would not share a home with his anger. When I say I held both truths, I mean that I lay with them, sleepless, in the dark.
The baby now consented to sleep in her stroller, as long as she was moving. So we never stopped. It made me think of the movie where the bus would explode if it ever slowed down. Or how sharks need to keep swimming to breathe. I was an art shark. I never stopped walking, except to nurse.
Also, I wanted to be taken care of. I told people I wanted to enjoy my singleness, when really what I wanted was a partner. But I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself.
My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind on the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets. This was where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin. These streets were the first streets I ever drove with my friends, late at night, with the radio cranked up, imagining our futures…. When I drove these streets now, it made me nostalgic for that plural state of being—imagining multiple possible lives. Now I just had this one life—with this baby, this marriage.
His loyalty through crisis, and his unflinching compassion; his awareness that everyone is more than his best or worst moments.
But nothing happened next. Or rather, this happened next: we were friends for twenty years; we were never together; I married someone else. Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.
The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.
Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”
Some writers hate revision, but I’ve always appreciated its clarifying adrenaline. It’s like plunging into a cold lake, or a basement plunge pool. A challenge. A scouring. Not comfortable, but exhilarating. There’s a visceral buzz that comes from removing an unnecessary sentence from a draft. In its absence, everything else is crisper, starker, more alive. In writing, these removals were a form of rigor. But in life, they felt like cruelty.
During my first weeks getting sober, when I was spending many evenings each week in church basements, I fell in love with these words from G. K. Chesterton: “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” In that dark gallery, I found myself.
She made solitude look liberating, while others made it look like a grind. I knew the truth everyone knows, which is that it’s both.
The road is pure loneliness, he wrote. Or rather, dying of loneliness & dying to be alone. It’s perfect for a sober alcoholic because you only feel bliss or terror. He was a self-dramatizer who was aware of his own drama. I recognized myself in his preemptive self-awareness.
That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.
Holding his disabled calico cat in a tight embrace against his tattooed chest. Lol, he said. But he loved it. He was so committed to his own mythology—living in the well-worn jeans of a certain sense of self—that I had trouble believing it.
Talking to him felt cozy and illuminated, like settling into the passenger seat for a long road trip, the car packed with gas-station snacks, rolling prairies beyond the windows, the buzz of everything ahead.
When I talked about the tumbleweed with friends, I’d say, Oh, I know we’re doomed, but only because I imagined us in a movie where the main character says, I know we’re doomed, and that means they aren’t doomed, after all.
This version of me spent whole days not checking his Instagram—not checking it, not checking it, not checking it—like starving myself in college, that self-denial as proof that there was some force inside me larger than my hunger. Perhaps I could call it dignity.
This wasn’t wanting. This was just wondering, What would it be like, after all these years, to feel that flush of relief again?
Kyle had given me this holiday without my daughter as an experience of presence rather than just absence. All this time, our friendship had been teaching me about ongoingness—how intimacy holds friction alongside sustenance, how pain and proximity emerge from the same honesty.
We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.
On the page where the conductor says, “To the North Pole, of course!” I always raised my finger to point at the ceiling, and did my silliest voice for the conductor. My daughter always raised her arm at the same time, her tiny finger also pointed, giggling madly, looking up at me to see if I’d seen. I knew there would never be a word for how this felt.
Getting my heart broken by the tumbleweed was a useful pain. It told me I could still want something so much I was willing to be broken by it.
Just because a relationship didn’t last forever didn’t mean it had failed. I wanted to feel this way about the tumbleweed. I wanted to feel this way about my marriage too. Roland Barthes once asked, “Why is it better to last than to burn?” A sober heroin addict once told me, “I like being hungry. It’s my body telling me it wants to be alive.”
The chill was stark, but the sky was blue and wide open like a doorway. Both things were true, the bitter wind and the brightness of the sky. Neither one dissolved the other.
But it made me nervous to think about sharing the actuality of parenting with him: the constancy and repetition, the ways it was neither new nor revelatory in most moments, just more of itself.
When he’d first told me the story of his marriage and divorce, now seven years behind him, I could hear genuine pain in his voice, but also the well-worn grooves of an oft-told tale. I asked if he felt like he was still learning.
He would often preface things he told me about his job, his home, his exes, by saying, “The thing I always say about this is…” Letting me know I was getting a secondhand sentiment. A polished stone of selfhood.
His shower was a graveyard of expensive conditioners left by other women he’d dated. When I asked if it stirred up old feelings to see things that belonged to his exes, he said no. I nodded, receiving the news about this different way of being alive.
Table, the ex-philosopher told me that there was something about our conversations that felt unsatisfying to him. His comment was like a heat-seeking missile the universe had sent to destroy me. He actually said it this way: “It feels like our conversations are about 85 percent as good as they could be.”
