Podcast Transcription: Leslie Jamison

Feb 28

Feb 28 Podcast Transcription: Leslie Jamison

We started a podcast, remember? We’ve got another episode! This time with Leslie Jamison. Below is the transcription of the interview. You can stream that episode on Spotify here!

This episode, our Events Director Amali interviewed Leslie Jamison. The two talk about Leslie’s upcoming memoir, Splinters: an exploration of rebuilding her life as a new mother amidst divorce. The two talk about forgotten food subscriptions, motherhood, and revisiting purple google links.

Amali

So today I'm joined by Leslie Jamison to discuss her upcoming memoir, Splinters, a story of love, divorce, motherhood and more.

So along with teaching at Columbia University and working as a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, you've published a collection of essays, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and a nonfiction book that's kind of a memoir, kind of more than a memoir, The Recovering. But Splinters is officially your debut memoir in the truest sense of that word. How does that feel?

Leslie

First of all, I just want to say I'm so happy to be talking to you and just- part of this new venture for Books Are Magic. I feel like I have a particular tender deep place in my heart for indie bookstores but can think of so many wonderful memories at Books Are Magic events, like cruising the store now excitingly perusing the stores plural as you guys have become multiple so just thrilled to be here.

And it's an exciting thing to be putting a book into the world that can kind of officially be called a memoir. There's, you know, in the literary world I feel like there can be some resistance to the genre of the memoir, or I guess, maybe it just comes attached to a lot of baggage for different people. And that baggage probably are different sizes and shapes depending on who's carrying it. But this idea that the, you know, the form of the memoir is sort of confessional or lurid or, or is somehow a little bit less crafted because it's diaristic. And it's just quote unquote, like saying what's happened, or it's navelgazing or solipsistic. I mean, they're sort of all kinds of ways that the memoir can get, a bit of a bad rap. And sometimes for those reasons and other ones, writers are a little bit wary of identifying with it.

But I have to say, I just, I feel such a deep faith in storytelling from lived experience that I believe that art can be made from what we've lived and that one of the forms, not the only form, but one of the forms that can take is the form of the memoir. I believe it, I teach it to my students– not just formally –but try to encourage them to own that making art from lived experience is not less artful and it's not somehow a degraded thing that's done by those who can't bring themselves to imagine anything or something which I think is sometimes the little bit of the unspoken taboo under it. So I'm glad in that sense for a chance to be able to practice what I preach and say “yes, here I am. I've made art from what I've lived and I'm sharing that art with the world.”.

Amali

Yeah. And I mean, there is a part of you in every book that you've written, right? You've written about yourself, your family, your surroundings, and how you yourself tie into issues and society at large, right? So a whole range of those things. And now, your daughter, which feels like a topic that is much more close to your heart.

Because of that, I'm curious if you had a different process of preparing when approaching the, yeah, just the craft of writing this memoir, either in a physical, like a literal outlining sense or in, you know, a mental way as well.

Leslie

I love that question. And because I knew we're an audio form, I wish I could somehow vocally express that even when you said the word “outlining”, I was nodding and my eyes got wide. All of these terms of process and even certain organizational terms are really thrilling to me. I've always felt like one of the stores that I felt most spiritually connected to was The Container Store. And I think that the kind of writing craft corollary to that is that I'm really– I'm soothed in lots of ways by processes of organizing and outlining and brainstorming and dividing big emotional and intellectual work into smaller tasks. So all that to say, I do have some things to say about process and outlining.

And maybe just to back up for a second, I would just say that Splinters is about all of the things you mentioned at the beginning: motherhood, divorce, rebuilding, beauty as a kind of means of survival, friendship, teaching, all the various ways we kind of– or I –have made and remade a self. Concretely, it takes place over two and a half years. The first two and a half years of my daughter's life and across those two and a half years the narrative tracks the dissolution of my marriage and the core of the book is this attempt to build a new life for myself and my daughter in the aftermath of my marriage ending. And so that's the sort of terrain of the book and very early on an important part of figuring out how to tell that story, how to tell the story of motherhood, which is both, as you say, close to my heart and also narratively challenging in lots of ways. I mean, we're sort of blessed to live, I think, in a literary decade that has seen many, many wonderful and powerful accounts of parenting and motherhood, but I think there are still some facets of parenting that are a bit resistant to narratives that have to do with the fact that it can be mind-numbingly repetitive, quite banal, extremely kind of non-dramatic, and also is just incredibly common. I definitely have never been a believer that a prerequisite for wonderful nonfiction is to somehow, personal nonfiction, it's to somehow have lived an extraordinary or special life. I believe any life can be a vehicle for summoning dramatic tension, profanity, insight, all of it.

That said, you know, there can be something about the commonness of parenting that feels like, “well, why am I telling this story at all? Anybody who's already lived it already knows it. Maybe anybody who hasn't lived it, why do they want to read about it?” So I think for those reasons, there were all these kind of narrative challenges that presented themselves around narrating motherhood. And then a different set of narrative challenges that presented themselves around narrating to whatever extent I was gonna narrate it, like marriage and the dissolution of marriage. But in both cases, there was a form that arrived that felt like it could carry me through those narrative challenges. And that was the form of– really what I came to think of as the form of The Splinter, which is like these short, whittled, you know, anywhere from a paragraph to a page: units of text. And so the book is my first memoir, but it's also a bit formally different from my other work just in terms of really being composed of these very sharp, spare narrative moments where I sort of touched down in a scene for a moment to get exactly what I need from it, but I'm not staying in scenes for pages and pages and pages. And I'm also not taking a reader kind of continuously through time in the way that more kind of standard chronological scenic memoirs might.

So I think that form of The Splinter, and the book is called Splinters in part for formal reasons. In part the book is called Splinters because it's very much about “how do certain experiences, even especially painful experiences, lodge inside of us and become part of us and get under our skin and stay with us and rearrange the molecules of who we are?” It felt useful to me in narrating parenting, because it's like, “all right, I'm not gonna give you the blow by blow of every day, every moment with my daughter, but I am gonna find a few moments that carry some of the emotional tensions I'm interested in.” And then with the plot line about my marriage and its ending, it felt like a way of telling exactly the parts of the story that I wanted to tell, but not telling the whole story, which is always, I think, part of personal narrative. You're never giving a complete account of experience because both that would be logistically impossible, it would take as much time to tell it as it did to live it. But also, you know, for reasons of, kind of, craft and privacy, there are parts of your life that, you know, you keep as your own and parts of other people's lives that you keep for them. And also a kind of way that you're not just saying what happened, you're deploying experience to kind of investigate certain questions about “what does it feel like to be alive” or “what did it feel like for me to be alive in this period?” And so again, these sort of short unit sizes helped me sort of figure out what are the particular moments in this very difficult, messy, emotionally charged story that feel absolutely necessary to this literary project.

Amali

Yeah, yeah, and I loved the little Google searches that kind of helped break up each section and almost kind of help provide a timeline to the story as well. And I loved– I was going back through those and I was like, “oh my gosh, does Leslie just have an entire Google document just filled with Google searches?”

So I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about those and, I don't know, how you came to the idea to use those as almost epigraphs in a way before each section and what else– how many of those are out there?

Leslie

Yeah, I love that you asked about those. So the book is divided into three sections called Milk, Smoke, and Fever. And, I guess to put it roughly, the book begins in this very intense narrative moment which is me and my daughter moving into a sublet that I think of, still think of as The Firehouse Sublet. It was this little sublet right next door to a firehouse. We moved there right after the end of my marriage and it was very much this space of simultaneous grief. Grieving the end of the marriage and also a lot of love and happiness and joy as I was still actively inside this kind of never ending process of falling in love with my daughter and getting to bear witness to her consciousness coming into being kind of right in front of me, which is one true thing to say about having a child, even if it's not, you know, the whole story.

And so the book begins in The Firehouse Sublet and then kind of pulls back to tell you, “how did we get there.” And that's sort of the first section, Milk. And then the second section, Smoke, basically narrates what happened next, what happened after this ending that was also a beginning. And then the third section, Fever, is a bit of a coda about the experience of early quarantine when it was just me and my daughter and I was sick and she was thankfully not. But it's sort of a, in a way, it's like an attempt to synthesize the– if Milk is so much about kind of the stage of melding and being just– one being with my daughter and then Smoke is in part about how to claim a way of being more than just this melded dyad of me and my daughter. I think of Fever as this attempt to kind of in this dialectical way come to some sort of synthesis. Like “how does one both feel completely bonded with one's child and also recognize that she is more than me and I am more than her.” So those are the three sections and a little bit of their movement.

And as you say, each one starts with a kind of a prose poem composed of Google searches. So everything from “what is the thousand dollar crib that does everything a mother is supposed to do?” to “what's the average hourly rate for a divorce lawyer in New York City?” to “what STDs can be transmitted through breast milk?” So there are these kind of little narrative previews embedded in those Google searches. And in that way, I think of them as a kind of contemporary version of, I think they're called arguments, but the italicized openings to old Western novels or like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian also has them. Like these, these little– or like The Believer Magazine does them for their essays, these little kind of “here's– here's a, here are these sort of beautiful luminous lyric snippets of what's to come.” And so they serve some of that function, a kind of preview function, but they also to me are testifying to something that I do find to be true about Google searches and our Google search histories as these kind of layered “palimpsestic”, is that a word? They are palimpsest? They are “palimpsestics”, basically these kind of confessional booths of the questions that we ask of Google are really interesting ledger of our lives and some questions are really concrete, “okay, I need to figure out what time it is in Barcelona when it's this time in New York if I'm going to be calling, you know, this heartthrob musician who I've fallen in love with who's in Barcelona.” But I also bring, I think we all bring these kind of very charged or private or loaded questions to, to Google, you know, “how do I, how do I figure out how much somebody actually loves me?” These kind of questions that are unanswerable, but we want to ask somebody so I was also interested in Google searches as a kind of repository for longings and un-answerables that we're carrying with us at any given life era.

Amali

Yeah, and I feel like it just– it almost gives the reader just a slightly different glimpse into your mind, you know, in each of these stages and the process of the story in your life because Google isn't going to judge you the way that a human will, right? You can put in whatever question you want and it'll give you some results. Maybe it's not what you're looking for, but it's something whereas you ask that question to a human and a face comes with it or a follow up question. So I really love that as a way to kind of open it up into many more thoughts and in-depth feelings of, yeah, each one of those sections in the book.

Leslie

I love that observation about Google searches. I mean, we can do a whole separate podcast that's just like this: “The Psychological Layers of Google Searches”! But that idea that it is! It's a non-judgmental entity. And in a way, I think there's a hunger for the kind of endless answer that can come up in Google searching and at a certain point in the book, I actually narrate this experience, but when you do a Google search that you've done before, and then you see some of the kind of purple links that you've already clicked on, but then sometimes they're these fresh blue links. And I feel like there's something about the hoping for the fresh blue links that's connected to a deeper kind of human yearning, which is like, “maybe I can do the same thing I've done before, but it will have a different result” Or “maybe I can ask the same question I've asked before, but it'll have a different answer.”

And there are a couple of moments when, in addition to the kind of prose poems at the beginning of the sections, where the act of Googling is part of the narrative. And at one point, my daughter, when she was very young, was, had this problem with her thyroid. And so that– there was a kind of era that a moment that everybody I think is familiar with, of just frantic medical Googling, where it's just like, “if I can just Google this enough times, I'll be OK.” And I write a little bit about just the heart weight, in a way, of encountering just a sea of purple links and realizing this thing you want from the world that maybe Google could deliver to you, which is to say reassurance or an answer. When you see just the purple links, you're like, “okay, not everything is going to be answered here.”

Amali

Yeah, absolutely.

Amali

So Splinters is as much about motherhood as it is about daughterhood so I’m asking some Books Are Magic booksellers about books that make them think about their mom. Here we have Tiffany.

Tiffany

Hi everybody!

A book that makes me really think of my mom and just growing up in general is What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez. Reflecting back on my childhood I never saw Puerto Rican slang or phrases that my mom and I used referenced in books and this was the book that I saw that happen. Whether the mom Delores was watching Caso Cerrado on the couch or she was playing Héctor Lavoe or making coquito. So all of those things– and the way that she fiercely loves her daughters. And her love language is cooking for them or coming to their place and cleaning for them as most Latino moms do just really really resonates with the relationship I have with my mom

Aatia

This is Aatia. A book that makes me think of my mom is Intimations by Zadie Smith. Zadie Smith is one of my favorite contemporary writers for a number of reasons, but I think what is so strong about herself and her own writing is this sort of self-possessed quality. I think she speaks with a lot of intelligence and groundedness that shows up in how she writes about her family and her own upbringing and sort of the emphasis on education and having books around. So her recent collection of essays, Intimations, is one of my favorites for that reason because it reminds me of my mom.
Amali

Thank you!

Amali

To bring it a little bit more back to craft, as someone who's currently working on a long-form piece of non-fiction that I hate to call it anywhere remotely close to a memoir at this point, but– I found that one of my biggest obstacles is memory and the lack thereof.

So I'm curious if you could talk about some of your methods of documenting events and feelings as they occur or, you know, inversely, grappling with the difficulty of remembering them weeks and months and years later.

Leslie

Such a fantastic question and whether we have time for it in this conversation or another one, you can 100% bet I will be asking you some follow up questions about your project. This is these– as you point out, these are the perils of conversations with other human beings as they ask follow up questions and you see their big wide-eyed excited faces. Yeah, I mean, I would say a few things about– about memory and documentation.

One of them is I do quite a bit, of writing things down close to the time. And I have, you know, at various points, I've kept physical diaries. I'm not a continuous diary keeper, but I am a long-term diary keeper, which is to say I probably have 20, 25 diaries from the last 30, 25 years of my life. So there is a kind of documentation that happens in that way. I also do some doc– I just have some running documents on my computer around motherhood, around, you know, sometimes I'll– if I feel, if I'm starting to feel like I'm inside of an experience that I might wanna return to or write about, I might just open up a document, but very much allow that document to be, you know, just a mess of details, specificities, sense memories, moments, bits of dialogue. I'm such a believer in specifics. There's a moment in the text where I talk about how I tell my students so many times to get specific in workshops and around their own work that I actually made them a cake at the end of the semester. I said, get specific on it.

And so in that way, it's like, well, if I want the prose to be specific, the me who is living the experience needs to sort of equip the retrospective me who is gonna look back on it with as many particulars as possible. And in that way, it's partially about accuracy, but it's also partially about lushness and texture and world and wanting the prose to feel sort of sharply realized. So there's definitely a kind of documentation that happens, you know, again inconsistently and imperfectly, but does happen.

I'm really interested in what I call “personal archives”, by which I mean just the kinds of archives that anybody accumulates, especially in our contemporary, very technologically mediated moment in history, just to say everybody has text threads, everybody has–I mean, not, I shouldn't say, not every single person on this planet–but many people have text threads, have photos on their cell phone, videos on their cell phone, Gmail conversations, recipes, receipts, just like social media histories, and all of that is both– there's a kind of terrifying, breadth to our technological and digital footprints. But I also think there's a way that those personal archives can be tremendous resources when you're trying to write into the past. And so I definitely will sometimes, if I'm trying to write or remember a particular era in my life or a particular relationship or a particular thing that happened, I'll kind of go back into Gmail and text conversations and just see, you know, what was I saying to people about it at the time. What other stuff was going on for me at the time.

There's an example I give sometimes from the process of writing The Recovering actually, where I was trying to write about the end of a relationship in that book and realized that everything I was saying was really abstract and that part of that was because I was just struggling to kind of dredge up specifics from the murk and muck of memory and so I actually did a big Gmail comb, not just searching for that person's name and the and the relationship itself, but also just looking in that particular fall and, like, what else was in my gmail inbox and I– one of the things I ended up discovering was this CSA, this farm subscription that me and my partner had signed up for that had I totally forgotten about and they would email recipes each week that went with whatever produce they had delivered. And I had completely forgotten about all these vegetables that would arrive in the mail and I'm not a superstar cook to begin with. And I was also not in a great place at that moment. So I what I remember the second I started to see these you know, very aspirational recipe emails that are, like, kohlrabi slaw and zucchini cake I just immediately flashed all of these vegetables kind of going soft and rotten in the deep corners of our crisper. And then I was like, “okay, this is something”. Whatever part of me hoped for things to go another way was a part of me that was like, “yes, let's get some fresh produce every week and then we'll have dinners and this will be our home.” And there was a kind of, there was a real hope that was connected to the arrival of those vegetables each week. But that immediately gave me a kind of new set of details and materials to work with so it's just one example of the way that sometimes personal archives can not only give us some specifics, but once you start something then you never know what else that's gonna kind of spur into focus.

Amali

Yeah, yeah, 100%. They need to latch on to a smell, a zucchini, something tangible and, or even intangible and grow from there.

You touched on this a little bit, I think maybe in the first or second question, but I am currently reading Susan Scanlon's upcoming memoir, Committed. And she quotes you briefly saying “the performance of pain is still pain” which then got me thinking about a question that Melissa Febos had asked you during the virtual event that we did, what feels like years ago, I think that was 2022, for Body Work, which was “how you learn to push past the voices that keep telling you no.”

So my question is kind of a combination of both of these things, because in Splinters you're dealing with so many different kinds of pain and guilt and reckoning and all of these very, very difficult, muddled feelings. So what was it like to push through those and the naysaying voices while writing this?

Leslie Jamison

I feel like I need to start by saying– well, first of all, I'm very curious. I'm going to immediately look up at Susan Scanlon's book Committed because it sounds like a great title.

I should say: that quote, and I'm glad to know it's found its way into her book is actually a quote– I mean, it is a quote from Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, which is the last essay in the Empathy Exams. But it's actually a quote from my friend Harriet. She's quoted in the piece. But it's one of the quotes from that book that I encounter most frequently out there in the world. People quote it back to me. People say that it's meant something to them. I mean, I obviously quoted it because it's with me all the time and I find it quite profound. And just tangentially, I'll say Harriet, who is also quoted several times in Splinters. She has been one of my best friends for almost 20 years and is just a perpetual source of wisdom. Her own book is coming out in a couple of years and I can't wait for the world to have her wisdom unmediated through me. But, you know, I actually, I love this aspect of writing that I do get to kind of draw on and document community and friendship as means of survival, as sources of wisdom. And so I love that people kind of quote back to me Harriet's lines from my book. I love that kind of dimension of living where it's like, “I survived by the grace of other people giving me their insight.” And that's a huge means of how I just like cobbled together a way of being alive. So Harriet has now been this sort of figure in not one, not two, but, like, three of my books. Um, so I love that she's showing up there.

I think in terms of writing, writing into painful muddled murky experiences, writing past with Melissa, you know, so beautifully names as “those voices that are telling, you no,” I would say a few things. One is a very concrete thing about drafting and revision, which is to say I revised my work a lot. And that's not only hopefully helpful in terms of making the work the most sort of polished, concise, complex, purposeful version of itself, but it's also– there's a way in which it's daunting because I know when I sit down to write something that it's gonna go through many, many, many, many iterations that it's like a long road that I'm embarking on.

But it's also quite freeing in the drafting process to know and trust that there will be many revisions of something because it allows me to keep that initial drafting a bit protected from those voices that I know, or those concerns that I know are going to weigh heavily, you know, seven drafts in or eight drafts in, which is to say when I start showing it to the people who appear in the work or when I start thinking about what it will be like for it to actually be out of the world and read and knowing that I have lots of work between the now of the first draft and the eventually of the work moving into the world actually just helps me forget about all that later stuff and just try to let myself write freely, which is of course easier said than done.

But I think also having a very– having a very familiar and pretty ritualized process around sharing work with people who appear in it also helps me actually weirdly be a little bit more free when I write. So like, I always offer to share work with everybody who shows up in it and to listen to their thoughts and feedback and that process goes a lot of different ways, different times. Not everybody takes me up on it. And it's not like it always results in everybody being 100% pleased or happy. But knowing that I am going to do that at some stage, it actually liberates me. It might sound counterintuitive that it would liberate me, but it does because it liberates me from trying to anticipate, in the process of drafting, what somebody might think or what somebody would say, which is, like, a futile game anyway, I have learned. Because the truth is other people are other people. I cannot. know them or predict them. It's actually a kind of hubris to assume even that I would know what anybody would be bothered by. So at this point, I'm like, “I'm not gonna try to know what other people will be bothered by” and kind of preemptively gag myself from saying the things that they might be bothered by, which, you know, to be clear is totally how my psyche would wanna operate. Like, “let me think about anything that might potentially displease somebody. Anything that might potentially cause a conflict and just, you know, stop myself from saying it at all.” But it's like some version of me has learned that I can't actually know. It's not my place in a way to try to anticipate what other people will think. So what I can do is submit myself to a process where I actually give them a chance to tell me what they think. And then my work in the early parts of the process is to try to say what I– say what I want to say.

Amali

Yeah, and that kind of leads in nicely to the final big thing that I want to touch on, which is the age-old question really of how it feels writing about people who exist in real life, you know, in various kinds of relationships towards you and the trepidation or in some cases liberation that comes with them reading what you've written about them.

But in this case, it's a little bit different because you're writing about your very, very young daughter who can't even read, is not old enough to read a book like this yet. So she will be eventually, right. And so my question is, when or if she does eventually read Splinters, what do you feel trepidation about? And alternatively, what do you hope she takes away from it?

Leslie

You know, it'll be her choice whether she wants to or not. But if she does choose to read it, I– it's important for me to remember that like I can't know or control what she'll make of it. So I feel very clear in what my hopes are, but also very clear in the fact that those hopes are distinct from her right to kind of think whatever she thinks and feel whatever she feels.

And I think that's one of the struggles of parenting always is you want your kid to feel certain ways about the experiences you share with them. You know, you take a road trip to go camping for a weekend. Yeah, you want them to have a great time! You want them to feel like, “oh my god, I'm so connected to the natural world!.” But maybe the thing they mainly feel is like, “I was really scared all night long in the tent.” I'm like,” okay, well that was, yeah, okay. I can't control your feelings. And that's what you felt.” So with her I'm like, “okay, I have to kind of surrender to the fact that I've made this thing and when she reads it, she'll have her own reaction to it.”

But what I very much hope she feels is, you know, the book as you know, underneath everything else and more than it is anything else, like just a big love letter to her and to these years, these very early years of raising her. One of the threads that's really most important to me in the book is how much I honestly felt that I learned from her from the very beginning. I mean, she is, you know, a baby and a toddler that– the book you know, essentially ends when she's two and a half. And– but even in those years, in a way that I could not have anticipated before I was a parent, or just didn't anticipate, maybe I could have, but I didn't anticipate before I was a parent. She was so utterly herself. She really had a personality. She even had a real sense of humor from early on. And I felt like there was a lot about just her consciousness and her curiosity and her kind of witty way of being that I was always surprised by and a little bit productively rearranged by and always felt like we were both similar in certain ways and different in useful ways. And so I want very much for her to see the ways in which I kind of felt like her student, even as I was also her mother and her caregiver.

And I guess the second big thing that I hope she finds in it is an account of her early life that is an account of beauty and joy as well as, you know, certain kinds of grief and hardship. I want her to have a narrative of her earliest years that's not just like, my origin story as an origin story of rupture and dysfunction. I hope she also can feel like there was a lot of beauty in this time and that the book in some way can be a vessel or a document of that beauty for her.

Amali

Yeah, no, that's gorgeous. And there really is just so much– there's so much love. The friendships that you talk about in the book and the support systems that you have. Yeah, this book– it made me so emotional at times. So yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Just to wrap up with a few questions that we always love to ask our guests. What are you reading right now?

Leslie Jamison

Oh, I am reading. I actually have right here. You know, I know we're just audio, but I'm rereading The Selfishness of Others, an essay on the fear of narcissism by Kristen Dombek, which is just a brilliant book. I'm working on a piece about gaslighting for the New Yorker and have returned to Kristen's dissection of, not just like the narcissist, but the cultural construction of the narcissist and thinking about the gaslighter as a villain, both real and imagined. So yeah.

Amali

Oh yeah, we will be reading that when that comes out.

Leslie

I know it's sort of like I used to be really bad at pitches like magazine, pitches elevator pitches I felt like I never had an idea that was concise or compelling to an editor in a sentence and then somehow I seem to have arrived in my middle age at being able to be like “gaslighting” and everybody's like “yes I want to read that.” I'm like, okay, I've somehow gotten more tuned to something.

Amali

Very cool.

And then lastly, do you have anything to promote for our readers and listeners?

Leslie

I have two former students who have books coming out right around the same time as mine, which is just like a great joy to me. We're actually doing a three person event later this Spring. So I will gleefully and with my full heart shout out both Emmeline Clein's collection of essays, Dead Weight, and Eliza [Barry] Callahan's book The Hearing Test, both of which are out this Spring and they're both phenomenal and so smart and so life-changing and I just I love them both.

Amali

The Hearing Test was actually the first book that I read this year and it was amazing.

Leslie

Ah, good!

Amali

Iit like blew me away. It gripped me so, so immediately. And I just can't stop thinking about clicking down streets on Google Maps. Yeah!

Leslie

Mm hmm!

Amali

Absolutely, I cannot wait for that to come out so I can write a shelf talker for it immediately.

Leslie

Great, amazing. Yeah, Eliza and Emeline were both actually students in the same thesis workshop of mine in Fall of 2020, and they were both workshopping lots of pieces of writing that became part of those two books. So I couldn't be more thrilled.

Amali

Yeah, no, that's so cool.

Yeah! I think that's all we have. So thank you so much, Leslie. This was wonderful. We cannot wait for Splinters to officially hit the shelves in late February.

Leslie

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for just like thank you for your soulful, thoughtful response to the book and your wonderful questions and just the chance to, you know, take our new microphones on this journey, this digital journey together. So it's really been a pleasure.

Sources Mentioned:

Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison

The Recovering by Leslie Jamison

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Believer Magazine

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez

The TV show Caso Cerrado

The musical artist Héctor Lavoe

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Committed by Susan Scanlon (Available April 16)

Body Work by Melissa Febos

The Essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain from Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison