MOTHERHOOD
SPLINTERS
A memoir
LESLIE JAMISON
272pp. Granta Books. £16.99.
Leslie Jamison feels guilty about her approach to mothering, and while a first reaction to that might be “Join the club”, she does have some interesting insights to offer. Her guilt is exacerbated by having left a marriage when her baby was just thirteen months old. When her ex-partner, “C”, got her face tattooed on his biceps, she had thought: “there was no undoing what we’d done”. But it turns out tattoos don’t work like that, and soon lawyers were stepping in where therapists had failed to save the relationship. Part of the problem, as Jamison honestly admits, is that she could never quite believe their baby was as much C’s as hers. In this she may speak for many women who secretly regard their baby more as “mine” than “ours”. Part of her “wanted to eat [the baby] just to get her back inside me”.
Alongside the insights, there is a lot of beautifully expressed handwringing. When the baby is three months old, Jamison’s memoir about getting sober, The Recovering (2018), is published. She tells us this was a book “about humility, about surrendering ego”. Off she goes on a national book tour, with the baby, a breast pump and her mother in tow. Before a photo shoot, everyone’s drinking green juice but her. Jamison, squeezed into Prada cigarette trousers and a Versace blouse, feels disgruntled that she has no green juice. Celebrity and motherhood are a difficult juggling act; our hearts may or may not bleed.
One of the pitfalls of memoir is making every last thing symbolic of something larger. While Jamison is still with C, an infestation of ants is a reminder that “something was not right in our home”. The hissing and sputtering of radiators sound “angry”. Later, when she is invited to a literary festival on Capri, she finds the Mediterranean “brazen in its blueness. It was not apologizing to anyone. It wasn’t justifying why it deserved to absorb sunlight or reflect it”. No: the Mediterranean is selfish that way.
Single motherhood is difficult, of course, even when you have many interesting options in your life, a supportive ex-husband, a mother who can pitch in, therapists on tap and (later on) a sexually generous lover. Jamison is often funny about her situation, but after 200 pages we can sympathize with the friend who tells Jamison that she’s exhausting – always in the middle of some psychodrama. It’s brave of the author to include that assessment, along with her own reaction:
“I nodded – feeling hurt and also, recognized”. At some point Jamison quotes a line from G. K. Chesterton that could be instructive for us all: “How much larger
