Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. This week we're sharing our
Speaker 1: favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's the
Speaker 1: show where editor of the Monthly and Rabid Reader Michael
Speaker 1: Williams talks to some of the best and most respected
Speaker 1: writers in the world today. That person is American essayist
Speaker 1: and novelist Leslie Jameson, and Michael Williams is here to
Speaker 1: tell us a bit about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi Michael, Hi Ruby, Michael.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Leslie Jameson her work. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: It really manages to knit the very personal and very
Speaker 1: private moments with this kind of wider cultural commentary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's this funny thing that happens periodically, which is
Speaker 3: a writer comes along and they have a certain degree
Speaker 3: of success, and then what happens is every second writer
Speaker 3: tries to emulate their style, you know, tries to ape
Speaker 3: the rhythms and the way they approach their subjects and
Speaker 3: tries to capture their voice again and again and generally
Speaker 3: falls short. Lesley Janison's one of those writers. Her first
Speaker 3: book was called The Empathy Exams. It was initially an
Speaker 3: essay and then she turned it into this award winning
Speaker 3: collection and people absolutely lost their shit over the way
Speaker 3: in which she combined kind of journalism and reporting on
Speaker 3: the one hand, and literary criticism with psychology and then
Speaker 3: self disclosure, kind of utterly fearless ability to put herself
Speaker 3: and her own experiences into these essays in a way
Speaker 3: that didn't detract from the kind of scholarly and journalistic
Speaker 3: venue but enhanced it. People love Leslie Jamison and with
Speaker 3: good reason.
Speaker 1: And her latest book, it's been described as a divorce memoir.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is about divorce, and it's a memoir, so
Speaker 3: all of that is fair. I mean, if you're a
Speaker 3: writer who's known for kind of excoriating explorations of your
Speaker 3: own life, the breakdown of your relationship must feel inevitably
Speaker 3: like it's going to be part of a book. But
Speaker 3: this one's also about kind of what it is to
Speaker 3: be a parent, but not just to parent. It's not
Speaker 3: just about the pressures of a newborn baby. It's also
Speaker 3: about being a teacher, and about being an artist, a lover,
Speaker 3: all these different things, and part of what makes it
Speaker 3: such an interesting read is super fragmentary, these kind of
Speaker 3: short glimpses and things that dip in and out of
Speaker 3: her life and her experiences. It's really intimate and surprising,
Speaker 3: and the chat is much the same.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment Leslie jamerson'sch history.
Speaker 3: One of the things for which you are most celebrated
Speaker 3: and beloved as a writer is the ways in which
Speaker 3: in your previous works of nonfiction you used a critical
Speaker 3: voice and criticism as a form to place a little
Speaker 3: bit of distance between the personal and your subject matter.
Speaker 3: And so I want to maybe begin there, because letting
Speaker 3: that go must have been an intense.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So one of the things that I not only believe
Speaker 4: but kind of viscerally need to do with each project
Speaker 4: is to do something that feels very different from anything
Speaker 4: I've done before, to feel both thrilled by that difference
Speaker 4: and a little humbled and bewildered by that difference, to
Speaker 4: feel like I'm sort of learning the new terrain and
Speaker 4: texture and rules of any given project. And when I
Speaker 4: started to work on Splinters, I knew from very early on,
Speaker 4: I knew the emotional intensity that it was at its core,
Speaker 4: that it was going to be about the beginning of
Speaker 4: my daughter's life the end of my marriage, those two
Speaker 4: things happening roughly at the same time, and that it
Speaker 4: was very interested in that not of feeling at the
Speaker 4: center of my life in those days, that was feeling intense,
Speaker 4: intoxicating love and deep grief at the same time. And
Speaker 4: it was really, more than anything, I think, interested in
Speaker 4: what it feels like for life to hold radically conflicting
Speaker 4: and different feelings at the same time. So that was
Speaker 4: like I knew the beating heart of it, and very
Speaker 4: early on I kind of discovered the rhythms and unit
Speaker 4: size of how I wanted to tell the story, which
Speaker 4: is these very short splinters. Really these you know, the
Speaker 4: title is about form as well as content, these short
Speaker 4: splinters that are like vignettes of distilled, whittled shards of experience.
Speaker 4: And once I found the rhythm of those shards, I
Speaker 4: knew that I wanted.
Speaker 2: The book to live very close to.
Speaker 4: The personal almost the whole time, that it wanted to
Speaker 4: live in these little shards of prose and these distilled
Speaker 4: fragments of experience, and that I wanted it. I wanted
Speaker 4: its intensity to rise from staying very close to my subjectivity,
Speaker 4: very close to my body, very close to my physical experience,
Speaker 4: very close to my emotional experience, not at all from
Speaker 4: a sense that my experience was inherently more interesting than
Speaker 4: anybody else's, but from a sense that the particular ferocity
Speaker 4: of this book was very related to that sense of proximity,
Speaker 4: and so I wanted to kind of follow that proximity.
Speaker 4: And there is some criticism in the book, but you're
Speaker 4: right that it's a very different kind of criticism than
Speaker 4: shows up in a lot of my hybrid essays, where
Speaker 4: you sort of move from the personal to a more
Speaker 4: disembodied critical voice. And the criticism in this book is
Speaker 4: very embodied. It's me in galleries, engaging with art as
Speaker 4: I'm nursing my infant daughter, as I'm pushing my daughter
Speaker 4: in the stroller, as I'm kind of hungry for models
Speaker 4: of parent artists.
Speaker 2: So you're always still right.
Speaker 4: There, kind of in the casing of my skin, as
Speaker 4: you're looking out at the art. And I became really
Speaker 4: interested in how criticism itself functioned a little bit differently
Speaker 4: when it was embodied in that way.
Speaker 3: Once you hit on that form, once you hit on
Speaker 3: the splinters or the shads, did that inform the territory
Speaker 3: that you had to traverse, Like once it was clear
Speaker 3: to you that okay, these are going to be as
Speaker 3: you say, concentrated, they're going to be immediate. They have
Speaker 3: to be a certain kind of true. Did you find
Speaker 3: yourself then within that logic making new discoveries about what
Speaker 3: had to be included.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great question, because I think what I
Speaker 4: felt more than anything once I discovered the shard or
Speaker 4: the splinter, as my form is, I felt a tremendous
Speaker 4: amount of freedom. I felt like I could come and
Speaker 4: go as I pleased in relation to my own experience,
Speaker 4: so that I could kind of dive into experience and
Speaker 4: extract very particular moments, extract, you know, the moment of
Speaker 4: me standing with my students at a cocktail party monologuing
Speaker 4: about how motherhood has made me more attuned to daily
Speaker 4: life and the universe and everything around me. And then
Speaker 4: one of my students says, I think your daughter might
Speaker 4: be choking on a great you know, and it's sort
Speaker 4: of that. But I don't need to tell you what
Speaker 4: happened earlier that day. I don't need to tell you
Speaker 4: more about that party. I don't need to tell you
Speaker 4: what happened that later that night, Like I just need
Speaker 4: to give you that moment. And there was a lot
Speaker 4: of freedom and a lot of energy, I think, in
Speaker 4: just kind of whittling everything down.
Speaker 2: To its essence.
Speaker 4: But it also gave me a lot of freedom in
Speaker 4: terms of moving across time and space and life roles.
Speaker 4: So I dip back into my childhood and into my
Speaker 4: relationship to my parents' marriage, and into my kind of
Speaker 4: early relationship to divorce and what divorce could mean and
Speaker 4: how it could transform a life, and move between being
Speaker 4: a teacher, a mother, a lover, on a date with
Speaker 4: somebody new.
Speaker 2: Like I just I could pivot as.
Speaker 4: Much and as freely as I wanted once I found
Speaker 4: those shards, both in terms of chronology and in terms
Speaker 4: of emotional terrain. And so I think it was that
Speaker 4: ability to discard everything that wasn't absolutely necessary to the
Speaker 4: particular story I wanted to tell, and to kind of
Speaker 4: move in my little spaceship exactly where I wanted to
Speaker 4: go that felt really thrilling to me about the form and.
Speaker 3: Also where you didn't want to go. I mean, you
Speaker 3: mentioned emotional terain, and one of the things that strikes
Speaker 3: me is as a subject matter, and obviously this might
Speaker 3: also be true of all kinds of things that we
Speaker 3: would write memoir about, but divorce and the breakdown of
Speaker 3: a relationship, particularly when there's a child involved, carries with
Speaker 3: it even societally, in the way we talk about it,
Speaker 3: in the way we narrativize it, all kinds of pockets
Speaker 3: of shame and an idea around privacy because you're not
Speaker 3: the only person involved and you feel such complex emotions.
Speaker 3: How hard was it to work out what was appropriate
Speaker 3: and what was necessary to make the book what it
Speaker 3: should be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, amazing question and very related to form and structure.
Speaker 4: So I'm glad to be thinking about it in those
Speaker 4: terms because I think another thing that discovering the form
Speaker 4: of this book, the form of the Splinter, allowed me
Speaker 4: to do is tell precisely the parts of the story
Speaker 4: that I wanted to tell, and yes, leave a lot out,
Speaker 4: but hopefully leave a lot out in a way that
Speaker 4: doesn't give a reader a sense of the sort of
Speaker 4: violence of the curtain being forcibly drawn closed, like oh,
Speaker 4: here's this window, but you can't see what's in here.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: To create a work of art that feels whole.
Speaker 4: And complete while leaving a lot of lived experience out
Speaker 4: not only you know, allows me to hopefully avoid repetition
Speaker 4: TDM redundancy but also to protect the privacy of yes,
Speaker 4: my ex husband, various members of our family. And I
Speaker 4: think that, you know, the part of the breakdown of
Speaker 4: my marriage that I was most interested in exploring was
Speaker 4: really grief. I didn't want to place blame. I didn't
Speaker 4: want to litigate old struggles and sort of convince a
Speaker 4: reader that somehow I had been right about all these
Speaker 4: arguments we'd been having like that. That was just miles
Speaker 4: and miles away from the book I was.
Speaker 2: Interested in writing. But what I did want to write
Speaker 2: was grief.
Speaker 4: I wanted to write the grief of love ending, and
Speaker 4: I think even more specifically, I wanted to write the
Speaker 4: grief of having a vision for what a relationship might
Speaker 4: be and that vision never really coming to pass, and
Speaker 4: so in a way you're grieving not what was, but
Speaker 4: what could have been. And that was a grief I
Speaker 4: was interested in writing. So I knew the emotional dimensions
Speaker 4: of the marriage plot line that I was interested in
Speaker 4: and also the parts that I wasn't interested in. But
Speaker 4: even within that, the process was quite ragged and imperfect,
Speaker 4: and I think revision was very helpful in terms of
Speaker 4: steering the manuscript away from these parentheticals. Where I still
Speaker 4: was kind of doing that thing where maybe I needed
Speaker 4: to get this little barbin or say, my little piece
Speaker 4: about a way that I'd been wronged. And what's wonder
Speaker 4: about revising a manuscript is you don't have to You're
Speaker 4: not beholden to the first version of how you said
Speaker 4: of things.
Speaker 2: But I think you.
Speaker 4: Know, in the process of figuring out how to write
Speaker 4: the thread of this book that's about my marriage and
Speaker 4: it's dissolution, I also really benefited from the wisdom of
Speaker 4: close friends and readers. And I remember, in particular the
Speaker 4: memois who's also a dear friend of mine, Mary Carr,
Speaker 4: read an early draft of the book and said, you
Speaker 4: never let us hope with you, like it's written too
Speaker 4: much through the gauze or the kind of dark veil
Speaker 4: of disappointment and regret, so that even when you're writing
Speaker 4: the early moments of your relationship, we feel their doom
Speaker 4: already embedded inside of them in your retrospective voice.
Speaker 2: So what if you let us.
Speaker 4: Inhabit them more fully, inhabit your hope, inhabit your love,
Speaker 4: and habit the good parts. And she said, I remember
Speaker 4: it really clearly because it was so wise and so
Speaker 4: immediately like, Oh, I don't necessarily want to hear the
Speaker 4: truth of what you're saying, but I recognize the truth
Speaker 4: of what you're saying. She said, you don't write the
Speaker 4: pain of divorce by writing what's.
Speaker 2: Difficult about the divorce.
Speaker 4: You write the pain of the divorce by writing deeply
Speaker 4: into the love that came before. So that was really
Speaker 4: some of the work of revision as well, was truly
Speaker 4: allowing myself to reinhabit the hope and kind of intoxicating
Speaker 4: love of the early years. But I do think there's
Speaker 4: something useful about the process of trying to find precise
Speaker 4: and accurate language for the things that torment you, And
Speaker 4: I do think that the process of writing a book
Speaker 4: can be helpful in that regard. And maybe more than anything,
Speaker 4: I think that revision and what happens in the course
Speaker 4: of revision can be useful in kind of enacting the
Speaker 4: fact that it's possible to have a transforming relationship and
Speaker 4: an evolving relationship to the events of one's life, that
Speaker 4: one isn't stuck in a certain mode of feeling towards
Speaker 4: a thing that happened, that you can kind of tell
Speaker 4: the story and then tell it in a different way
Speaker 4: re excavate. For example, so much of what was beautiful
Speaker 4: about the marriage. I did that for creative and aesthetic
Speaker 4: reasons in revising this book, but it actually also feels
Speaker 4: like a place where the truth of that early beauty
Speaker 4: can live. And there aren't, honestly that many places that
Speaker 4: I can currently live in my life, So to have this.
Speaker 2: As a repository for just like there was.
Speaker 4: So much of this love that to me remains beautiful
Speaker 4: and worthwhile and part of me even even though the
Speaker 4: marriage ended, it feels that felt like, oh, I can
Speaker 4: actually claim that, and I don't need anybody to agree
Speaker 4: with me for that to be a truth.
Speaker 3: And you reflect on the evolution of the use of
Speaker 3: pronouns in the book, from my Daughter to the ways
Speaker 3: in which the act of writing, the act of narrativizing
Speaker 3: also both mirrors and drives a capacity to move.
Speaker 4: Forward absolutely, and I think, yeah, I love that you
Speaker 4: brought up. I think of it as the pronoun subplot.
Speaker 4: You know that there are many subplots in this book,
Speaker 4: and the fraud grappling with.
Speaker 2: That hour is it's also.
Speaker 4: A kind of a secret reference to what I think
Speaker 4: of as one of the core Godmother.
Speaker 2: Texts of this book, which is Elizabeth Hardwick's.
Speaker 4: Sleepless Nights and amazing book. It's a stunning book. It's
Speaker 4: very much a book about divorce, although she's incredibly oblique
Speaker 4: about it. But at one point she's describing all the
Speaker 4: furniture that she's brought from Boston to New York after
Speaker 4: what she calls a change in government, and she's describing,
Speaker 4: you know this, the tall high boy and the bookshelves,
Speaker 4: and she says, you know these these things had once
Speaker 4: in hours that tea bag of a word steeped in
Speaker 4: the conditional, and that was such a beautiful formulation of.
Speaker 2: Like part of the heartbreak of divorce.
Speaker 4: And a marriage ending. But it also felt like, yeah,
Speaker 4: this word hours is always a way into kind of
Speaker 4: emotional process of building a life together and then dismantling
Speaker 4: it and like what was ours?
Speaker 2: What remains ours?
Speaker 4: How both losing the hour and having to kind of
Speaker 4: grapple with the endurance of the hours are hard in
Speaker 4: different ways.
Speaker 3: Coming up after the break, Leslie shares the frustrating ways
Speaker 3: in which women writing from their lives can often be
Speaker 3: dismissed as role or at less. Will be right back,
Speaker 3: I'm interested in how you approach the ways in which
Speaker 3: this as subject matter, divorce, parenting, lands engendered, ways that
Speaker 3: the expectations around women writing about this and about mothers
Speaker 3: writing about this, and the ways in which that represented
Speaker 3: a burden or a framework that you felt you had
Speaker 3: to push back against.
Speaker 4: One of the overwriting truths I think here that I
Speaker 4: was certainly aware of is the ways that women writing
Speaker 4: from their lives making art from the material of what
Speaker 4: they've lived, And often the material of what they've lived
Speaker 4: has something to do with partnership, domesticity, various forms of caregiving,
Speaker 4: including caregiving for a child. That kind of art making
Speaker 4: is dismissed and misunderstood in a thousand ways that I
Speaker 4: think have everything to do with gender. And sometimes sometimes
Speaker 4: it's dismissed in very explicit ways that it's somehow less
Speaker 4: ambitious than you know, writing about other people's lives and
Speaker 4: writing about war than writing about these kind of bigger
Speaker 4: social subjects. Sometimes it gets dismissed in more implicit or
Speaker 4: backhanded ways. You know, a text is called raw or
Speaker 4: vulnerable or confessional, and often these are sincerely meant, maybe
Speaker 4: as terms of praise, but sometimes to call.
Speaker 2: A work raw is.
Speaker 4: To act as if it hasn't been intensely crafted and sculpted.
Speaker 4: And I think so often the texture of honesty, intimacy, proximity,
Speaker 4: which are the things the experience, the reading experiences that
Speaker 4: I think are often being summoned with that word raw,
Speaker 4: are actually really totally a product of craft choices and decisions.
Speaker 4: How do you make a reader feel close to your experience? Well,
Speaker 4: it's not actually by transcribing your diaries or writing everything down.
Speaker 4: It's often by really sculpting a particular version of the
Speaker 4: truth that can bring somebody that's not it's not an
Speaker 4: authentic for its sculpting. It's just it's it's it's it's artfulness, lies,
Speaker 4: and its ability to make a reader feel that way.
Speaker 4: So I think that there are all sorts of ways
Speaker 4: that women writing from life the writing gets treated as
Speaker 4: somehow less shaped by craft, intentionality, artistry, when often I
Speaker 4: find that my artistry is most challenged when I'm that
Speaker 4: I have to bring everything I have as an artist
Speaker 4: to that work that is about the closest and most
Speaker 4: personal experiences that I've had.
Speaker 3: One of the other threads that I so love in
Speaker 3: this book is about teaching, and teaches and about your
Speaker 3: identity as a teacher, And that seems to me to
Speaker 3: be almost as fundamental to it as the story of
Speaker 3: a disillusion of a relationship, the story even of parenthood.
Speaker 3: Is what it is to be a teacher and what
Speaker 3: it is to devote your life to that. How important
Speaker 3: is that to you?
Speaker 4: Thank you for bringing that up, because because teaching and friendship.
Speaker 2: Are two threads of this book that.
Speaker 4: Are just tremendously important to me, and that feel connected
Speaker 4: to all the other threads as well, I think, I
Speaker 4: you know, one of the questions of this book is,
Speaker 4: like when when your nuclear family breaks apart, When when
Speaker 4: a marriage ends, when you're no longer raising your child
Speaker 4: inside the family structure that you'd expected to raise them
Speaker 4: inside of, Like what other forms of family and community
Speaker 4: and intimacy become not only possible but essential, Like when
Speaker 4: you kind of don't have this one kind of stable
Speaker 4: structure the core of your life, Like where do you
Speaker 4: go looking for a sense of self and a sense
Speaker 4: of relation? And so for me, teaching in friendship became
Speaker 4: these extremely important forces in my life. They'd always been
Speaker 4: important to me, but after my marriage ended, they became
Speaker 4: like ferociously important to me, and I think part of
Speaker 4: it with teaching had to do with this deep hunger
Speaker 4: to be a caregiver in all these different ways at once,
Speaker 4: like I was always being a caregiver to my daughter.
Speaker 4: But I think that I kind of on the other
Speaker 4: side of marriage. I found myself both with a kind
Speaker 4: of a sense of exhilarating freedom that I hadn't necessarily expected.
Speaker 4: And at one point in the book, I describe it
Speaker 4: as it felt like I was in this a tub
Speaker 4: full of bubble bath. It was just overflowing, like I
Speaker 4: had all this like love and care that I just
Speaker 4: wanted to give somewhere, and you know, hopefully not in
Speaker 4: a totally.
Speaker 2: Creepy or unboundaried way.
Speaker 4: I was giving a lot of it to my students,
Speaker 4: and I loved putting my daughter to bed and showing
Speaker 4: up for their work. I felt very energized by this
Speaker 4: work of kind of getting this intimate contact with my students'
Speaker 4: creative impulses, with their lives, with the art they were
Speaker 4: trying to make, and that kind of collaborative process of
Speaker 4: helping them understand, hopefully a little bit better what they
Speaker 4: wanted to say and how they wanted to say. It
Speaker 4: was just it was a tremendous source of purpose and
Speaker 4: really community for me. I mean it still is, but
Speaker 4: there was a way that my nerve endings were so
Speaker 4: raw and my needs were so intense in that time
Speaker 4: after my early separation that it felt like it turned
Speaker 4: up the volume on every feeling in my life.
Speaker 3: I wonder whether it also reinforced a thing that you
Speaker 3: needed to have reinforced of a time, which was the
Speaker 3: idea that caregiving and relationships in the emotional space was
Speaker 3: also an intensely intellectual and creative process, that these weren't
Speaker 3: two fractured parts of who you were, they could be
Speaker 3: integrated in a real way. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I think that's a very resonant insight. That part
Speaker 4: of why I was hungry to be kind of thinking
Speaker 4: about and making sense of my relationship with my daughter
Speaker 4: in those early years, even as I was living it
Speaker 4: was because I didn't want to understand that emotional work
Speaker 4: and the kind of intellect work of thinking about feeling
Speaker 4: and thinking about how a self is sort of made
Speaker 4: and unmade and remade by its relationships, Like I wanted
Speaker 4: to think about caregiving and thinking together. And I think
Speaker 4: absolutely my relationships with students also bring together a sort
Speaker 4: of caregiving impulse and like a deeply intellectual enterprise. And
Speaker 4: one of the deep subjects of this book to me
Speaker 4: is understanding wisdom or the generation of wisdom as a
Speaker 4: collaborative enterprise. So, you know, for me, it is a
Speaker 4: collaborative enterprise. Like I don't come up with insights on
Speaker 4: my own I come up with insights in conversations, by reading,
Speaker 4: by listening, by you know, any anything. My mind thinks,
Speaker 4: it's always thinking in relation to other minds, So I'm
Speaker 4: always dramatizing in this book like moments, you know, conversations
Speaker 4: with friends where I'm sort of having some delusion about
Speaker 4: my own life punctured or being challenged in some way,
Speaker 4: or being invited to think about my own life in
Speaker 4: a different way. You know, some of the best lines
Speaker 4: in this book belonged to my friend Harriet, my mother,
Speaker 4: my therapist. But I wanted not just to incorporate those
Speaker 4: insights into the fabric and texture of the book, but
Speaker 4: I really wanted to dramatize explicitly that I was arriving
Speaker 4: at those insights by way of these conversations and collaborations.
Speaker 4: And I think teaching for me is like another form
Speaker 4: of collaborative meaning making.
Speaker 3: As becoming a mother changed your certainties or firmed them up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 4: It's a great question because I think I've never really
Speaker 4: understood myself to be a creature of certainties. I think
Speaker 4: I identify much more as a creature of doubt, like a
Speaker 4: creature made of questions, right, like made of interrogations and wonderings.
Speaker 4: But I do think that becoming a mother has made
Speaker 4: me aware that I am perhaps more composed of certainties
Speaker 4: that I want to believe myself to be. And part
Speaker 4: of that is just that, you know, there are lots
Speaker 4: of things in my life that I question. My devotion
Speaker 4: to my daughter is not something I do.
Speaker 2: I question my capacities as a parent.
Speaker 4: Do I question the ways that I might be messing
Speaker 4: her up? Do I question the choice I made in
Speaker 4: a certain moment to you know, bribe her with a
Speaker 4: gummy candy? Of course, like I am full of insecurities
Speaker 4: and wonderings, but there's a devotion there that I don't question.
Speaker 4: So in a way, that feels more like certainty than
Speaker 4: any love that I've known or given myself to in
Speaker 4: the past. And I also think It's helped me understand
Speaker 4: that my relationship to art making being a writer, there
Speaker 4: is a kind of certainty there that I hadn't always thought.
Speaker 2: Of in those terms.
Speaker 4: I think because my relationship to making art doesn't feel
Speaker 4: texture by certainty. It doesn't feel like, oh, I always
Speaker 4: know exactly what I need to do or exactly how
Speaker 4: I want to say this thing. Certainty is more like
Speaker 4: I know that this is what I want to be doing,
Speaker 4: Like I have always wanted to be a writer, and
Speaker 4: I've never really doubted that. That's like where the little
Speaker 4: needle of my compass is pointed. And to kind of
Speaker 4: come to an understanding that there's a certainty in that
Speaker 4: desire that isn't implying hubris or arrogance or a sense
Speaker 4: that I always know what I'm doing, but more that
Speaker 4: I know that I want to be doing it or
Speaker 4: I want to be trying.
Speaker 3: There's almost no better expression of uncertainty or our inner
Speaker 3: confusion than our Google search history. And I just wanted
Speaker 3: to touch upon that device within this book. And they kind
Speaker 3: of I've heard your pot of them as prose poems
Speaker 3: that kind of break up the sections of the book.
Speaker 3: Where did that idea come from and when when did
Speaker 3: that become part of the mix?
Speaker 4: Thank you for asking about them. Yeah, I call them
Speaker 4: the Google lyrics. At the start of each section that
Speaker 4: splinters is composed of three parts. They're called Milk, Smoke,
Speaker 4: and Fever. You know, Milk is really about the first
Speaker 4: year of my daughter's life before my marriage ended. Smoke
Speaker 4: is about the year that followed my separation, and Fever
Speaker 4: is about.
Speaker 2: The early stages of.
Speaker 4: COVID quarantine and lockdown, where my daughter and I became
Speaker 4: kind of once again. This like tiny little diad unit.
Speaker 4: But each of those three sections opens with this prose
Speaker 4: poem entirely composed.
Speaker 2: Of of Google searches.
Speaker 4: So they range from you know, what is the name
Speaker 4: of the crib that does everything a mother is supposed
Speaker 4: to do? To why does the queen aunt want to
Speaker 4: start a new colony? I was interested in the ways
Speaker 4: that our Google search histories are these like strange telling
Speaker 4: ledger of our deepest wonderings and often our most private wonderings,
Speaker 4: Like we bring ourselves to ask Google things before we
Speaker 4: can ask them of any any one else.
Speaker 2: I think, and so I started to think, Oh, what
Speaker 2: would you know, what would it look like.
Speaker 4: To evoke a self by way of its Google searches,
Speaker 4: Like what kind of series of windows would that offer?
Speaker 4: So that's where I really came to the form. And
Speaker 4: then I just got really energized by the possibilities of juxtaposing,
Speaker 4: you know, the Queen Aunt starting the new colony Google
Speaker 4: Search with the hourly rates for divorce layers in New
Speaker 4: York City Google Search, because again, like that's kind of
Speaker 4: what a day holds is often just navigating these very
Speaker 4: wildly different levels of life at once. And I, you know,
Speaker 4: at one point talk about the kind of panic of
Speaker 4: handing my computer over to somebody else, and like what,
Speaker 4: you know, what is the confessional booth of my auto
Speaker 4: complete going to reveal to them about my inner life
Speaker 4: and my obsession with the Mormon Tabernacle choir. You know,
Speaker 4: just like all the parts of the self that feel
Speaker 4: good of unspeakable we've spoken to Google.
Speaker 3: I felt that that was the only part of the
Speaker 3: book where maybe you'd sanitize the truth about yourself that
Speaker 3: there were carefully removed to Google searchers for the history
Speaker 3: where you like, no one needs to know that I
Speaker 3: needed to do.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, it's it's true.
Speaker 4: There's a there's a director's cut out there with the
Speaker 4: rest of the minute.
Speaker 3: Scandalous, I expect. Leslie Jamison, thank you.
Speaker 4: So much, Thanks so much for having me what.
Speaker 2: It's delight.
Speaker 3: Leslie Jameson's latest book, Splinters, Another Kind of Love Story,
Speaker 3: is available now.
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Speaker 1: Read This. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode, and
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