Leslie Jamison – författare

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.In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life - her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope - and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.'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... This memoir is a masterclass' Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of extraordinary talent - John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse among them - to take us inside the experience of addiction, exposing the contours, edges and wholes of an intoxicated life.Part memoir, part group biography, part literary history and part definitive analysis of cultural and social considerations of addiction, The Recovering is a significant moment in the history of post-war narrative non-fiction.

'Intelligent, compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best' Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries on THE EMPATHY EXAMSA profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and obsession, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a book about why and how we tell stories. It takes the reader deep into the lives of strangers - from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot - and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of other's lives while striving to find a deeper connection to the complexities of our own.

'Never less than gripping... Reads like a classic' Observer'Exceptional... thrilling and bitter and fulfilling' Vogue How do you rebuild a life? How do you move forward into joy when haunted by loss? How do you claim hope, while accepting the harm you've caused?This is the story of a ruptured marriage - one that was once brimming with hope. It is also the story of Leslie Jamison's consuming love for her young daughter, and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond. Exceptionally astute, and written with remarkable candour, Splinters is an account of motherhood, art and love, and what it means for a woman to be many things at once.'A treatise on the contradictions of being a mother, a partner, a daughter and an artist - singly, and all at once' New Statesman'Jamison encapsulates lived reality with evocative, embodied detail' Financial Times'Unputdownable... squishing layer upon layer of resonant truths into meticulously crafted paragraphs' Red

The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo's plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.