The 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 Mr. Bock became emotionally distant. “Our home was a place where I felt alone, and so—in retaliation or out of exhaustion—I made C feel alone too,” she writes. “His harsh comments shocked me so much that I stopped recognizing or relieving the underlying pain.”
After their breakup in 2019, she began taking notes for “Splinters” while living in a sublet next to a fire station, where she felt the sadness of the breakup as well as a “sense of hope and deep love,” she said. She wanted to explore these seemingly contradictory feelings on the page.
In her memoir, Ms. Jamison breaks these life events into fragments so that the reader can piece them together over the course of the book. By writing in short, intense vignettes, she said, “it felt like I was cracking open something in my language,” and discovered a new way of writing. “That’s always the feeling I want.”
Less than an hour after Ms. Jamison's daughter is born, on page 9, a nurse is walking the baby down the hall to be treated for jaundice. It takes the comforting words of another nurse for Ms. Jamison to feel the tears on her cheeks. After a while, Ms. Jamison writes, she rolls her IV stand down the hallway to watch her daughter glow blue under the nursery's bilirubin lamps.
Forty pages later, she reveals that during that “short while” she took out her laptop and continued reviewing an essay on female anger from her hospital bed, “tired with shame and pride.” After finishing editing just before her water broke, she had planned to continue her work at the hospital.
“Why did it kind of feel like saying, 'I came to work and was happy to come to work?'” she asked. “Why does this threaten to invalidate the feeling of sadness I shared the first time?”