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Marital problems began after the birth of her daughter and the publication of “The Recovering” in 2018, she writes in her memoir, when she and Bock became emotionally distant. “Our house was a place where I felt lonely and so, in retaliation or exhaustion, I made C feel lonely too,” she writes. “His biting comments of hers left me so irritated that I stopped trying to detect or alleviate the pain beneath them.”
After separating in 2019, she began taking notes for “Splinters” while living in a sublease next to a fire station, where she felt the pain of the breakup along with a “sense of hope and deep love,” she said. She wanted to explore those seemingly contradictory feelings on the page.
In his memoirs, Jamison breaks these life events into fragments for the reader to piece together throughout the book. By writing short, intense vignettes, she said, “I felt like I had opened something in my language” and discovered a new way of writing. “That’s always the feeling I want.”
Less than an hour after the birth of Mrs. Jamison’s daughter, on page 9, a nurse takes the baby into the hallway to be treated for jaundice. It takes comforting words from another nurse for Mrs. Jamison to feel the tears on her cheeks. After a while, Ms. Jamison writes, she moves her IV pole down the hall to look at her daughter illuminated blue under the daycare’s bilirubin lights.
Forty pages later, she reveals that during that “moment,” she pulled out her laptop and continued checking an essay on female anger from her hospital bed, “numb with shame and pride.” Having finished editing the copies just before her water broke, she had planned to continue working from the hospital.
“Why did I somehow feel like, ‘I got to work and I was glad I could do it’?” she asked. “Why does that threaten to invalidate the feeling of sadness that I narrated the first time?”