Vital changes always cause some sort of crisis that requires us to rebuild who we are. Motherhood is one of those “whirlwind” changes, but separation or divorce usually involves transformation as well. American writer Leslie Jamison (42, Washington) has explored through literature what happens when both experiences come together: becoming a mother and facing the end of a marriage. And he did it by documenting himself in one of the best library collections: his own experience. splinters (Anagrama, 2025) —her sixth book, but fifth translated into Spanish—, translated by Rita da Costa, is the result of this exploration that portrays not only what it means to be a separated mother —and in full confinement due to covid in a city like New York—, but also how to survive emotionally in a time marked by precariousness and isolation.
Written in a fragmented way, as other contemporary authors such as Rivka Galchen or Leila Sucari have done with their works, Jamison reflects very well how time flows during the first years of education: constantly interrupted. But precisely in this he sees a great opportunity to be able to give value to the most significant “little moments” of a baby, thus avoiding all those monotonous moments that hide behind.
His writing therefore becomes a form of resistance: a way to make sense of everyday chaos, to find beauty in the “pieces of a broken life”. Each fragment functions as a small window into the thoughts, doubts and discoveries of a woman who tries to make literary creation possible with the creation that motherhood implies without blurring the contours of one or the other. “There are many ways in which care and creation enrich each other,” the author explains to EL PAÍS.
ASK. She tells the story of her divorce, having a 13-month-old daughter. Would you say it’s an under-explored topic in the literature?
ANSWER. Although there are more and more literary stories about motherhood and, especially in recent years, more personal narratives about divorce, I hadn’t read many texts that intertwined both themes as main axes, a sort of double helix concerned not only with both experiences, but with the exploration of intense emotional simultaneity: that feeling of joy that coexists with pain. I wanted those threads to not only coexist on the page because they happened to me at the same time, but to illuminate each other as they did in real life and also reflect an experience of radical simultaneity (experiencing contradictory feelings at the same time), which I think almost all of us experience in one way or another.
Q. The first separation from her daughter caused her anguish, as did the subsequent moments in which her ex-husband took care of her. Have you discovered anything about yourself or motherhood by dealing with that physical distance from your daughter?
R. Part of the core work of motherhood, at least for me, has been understanding that intimacy and autonomy are not competing deities; that love can deepen through the experience of having separate lives, something that is sometimes harder to accept with a child, because you feel a radical responsibility and attachment. But I’ve really come to believe this about my daughter: The fact that we both also have our own connections to the world (including her separate life with her father) can strengthen, not undermine, our bond with each other.
Q. As for the bond between mother and daughter, she says of her mother that she is the only person she has been able to ask for help without a shred of ambiguity. How has this relationship affected the way you relate to your daughter?
R. In many important ways, I feel like a mother’s lightning rod: I receive the intense electricity of my mother’s love and act as a kind of conduit, transmitting that love to my daughter. It’s a way of saying that I feel like I’m giving a gift that I’ve already received, and I want my daughter to feel like she can depend on me in the same, or different ways, that I depend on my mother.
Q. To what extent does becoming a mother reopen old wounds with parents?
R. Parenting can reopen old wounds, but I think it can just as easily – or even more powerfully – open new forms of appreciation. After having my daughter, I felt some sadness for the difficult years I lived with my father, but I also learned to appreciate him more deeply (it also happened with my mother): I understood that being a father or mother is difficult, and that it is absolutely impossible to do it perfectly.
Q. Is writing about motherhood necessarily fragmentary due to the very nature of the maternal experience?
R. The fragments evoke in a very concrete way something typical of the experience of motherhood: time is always interrupted, divided into small fragments of attention and distraction. But for me they also drew attention to how much depth can exist in so-called “little moments”: a bowl falls to the floor and the child thinks he can use it as a funny hat; A glass breaks and the boy marvels at the power and terror of breaking something. The snippets allowed those little moments to have weight, and they also allowed me to step away from a narrative style that forced me to replicate all the repetition and boredom that is also part of parenting.
Q. Stories of how you took your laptop to the hospital and started writing within hours of giving birth. Is there a tension between the impulse to create and the expectations of motherhood?
R. There are some fundamental conflicts about time and attention that are very real: time is not infinite, and neither is energy, so caring for a human being necessarily means that one cannot always devote oneself to work. But I feel like these conflicts get too much attention; I was also interested in documenting synergies: all the ways that watching a human being become aware of the world could sharpen my curiosity about emotions, identity, self, intimacy, and love, in ways that would undoubtedly deepen and expand my work. There are many ways in which care and creation, both in a maternal and artistic sense, enrich each other.
Q. “I was under the impression that I would never do anything other than breastfeed and wander around with the baby attached to my chest,” she writes. It is often said that the days are long, but the years are short. Now that some time has passed, do you perceive it this way?
R. Caring for my daughter has shown me in a very visceral and consistent way that an essential part of love and intimacy is feeling like you can be a messy, imperfect version of yourself for another person; that you don’t always have to be perfect or represent yourself to her. Being a constant source of love and care for my daughter — in a way that isn’t dependent on her being “good” to me or keeping me interested — has sharpened my curiosity and commitment to the ways we might all offer each other that kind of support and permission: giving each other space, at times, to be messy, imperfect, boring, or incomplete.
