Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT February 20, 2024
The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed
Auditorium seating is sold out. To view the livestream at home, register above.
We are thrilled to welcome the brilliant Leslie Jamison (The Recovering, The Empathy Exams) to the stage to discuss her first memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. In this literary tour de force, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception toward 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. Placing the magical and the mundane side by side, Splinters reckons with the muchness of life and art and grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another. Masterful memoirist Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club) joins Jamison to discuss literary craft and questions of motherhood, art, and new love. After the conversation, Jamison will sign books.
All tickets include a copy of Splinters.
In Conversation
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Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She writes for numerous publications including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Photo Credit: Grace Ann Leadbeater
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Mary Karr
Mary Karr
Credited with kickstarting a memoir renaissance, Mary Karr has written three: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. All were New York Times bestsellers, as was The Art of Memoir. She’s received poetry fellowships from the NEA, Radcliffe College, and the Guggenheim. Her five collections include Sinners Welcome and Tropic of Squalor, the latter longlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse.
Photo Credit: Joe McNalley
Featured Book
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Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
By Leslie Jamison
Published by Little, Brown and Company
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 page. 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).