Leslie Jamison presents Splinters in conversation with Peter Bognanni

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes a blazing, unputdownable memoir (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the piercing, intimate story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. ​

Leslie Jamison is among our most beloved contemporary voices, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. In Splinters, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of her most intimate relationships: new motherhood, a ruptured marriage, and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, Jamison juxtaposes the magical and the mundane in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, a deep reckoning that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy while haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir for which the term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics. A master of nonfiction, Jamison evinces once again her ability to stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon (NPR).

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Splinters, The Recovering, and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.

Peter Bognanni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of three novels, one for adults and two for young adults. His first novel, The House of Tomorrow (Putnam 2010) won the L.A. Times Book Award for First Fiction and was adapted into a feature film starring Ellen Burstyn, Nick Offerman, and Asa Butterfield. The film played in 19 cities and in film festivals all over the world. His second novel, Things I’m Seeing Without You (Dial 2017) was published in four countries and is currently in development for television. His most recent book is This Book is Not Yet Rated, published by Dial in 2019. Peter was the winner of the 2013 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, which sent him to Rome on a writing fellowship for the year. He is also an occasional screenwriter and was awarded a Film Independent Screenwriting Fellowship in 2013. Peter has published short stories and essays in LitHub, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, The New York Times, and numerous literary journals.

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