SPLINTERS

The essayist and novelist makes motherhood central to a memoir about love, guilt, and grief.

Jamison and her husband had been in couples’ therapy for three years by the time their daughter was born—an event that intensified their marital problems. When the author’s mother came to help her in the first weeks, her husband felt shut out, and as Jamison exulted in motherhood, he became increasingly bitter and resentful. “Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a daily home with C’s anger?” Jamison asked herself. Motherhood changed her perceptions. “Those first months,” she writes, “made the everyday visible again.” At times overwhelmed by the “sudden and exhausting plenitude” of mothering, Jamison was enchanted by her daughter’s body, her needs, and her marvelous discovery of the world. Once she and her husband separated, though, she confronted the burden of single parenting, “the overwhelm of managing her presence without help,” and the ongoing pressure of juggling child care, writing, and teaching. Much of the memoir focuses on Jamison’s ambivalence about divorce. Finally, she realizes that grief about her divorce “did not have to wear the clothes of guilt.” She reflects on her own childhood as the daughter of divorced parents, someone who rarely saw the father she wanted desperately to please; her relationship with her ever-patient, ever-helpful mother; her anorexia and alcoholism; and the men she dated once her daughter began spending two nights a week with C. The “wild vacillations of melodrama” of those affairs revealed her repetitive pattern of “turning men into assignments. Make him faithful. Make him fall in love with you.” A lesson she keeps learning, she admits, is the “difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.”

Candid, intimate recollections on motherhood and commitment.