Splinters by Leslie Jamison
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
Review by Denise Napoli Long
It’s called Divorce Memoir, but there ought to be a subcategory, Divorce Mom Memoir, and a sub-sub category: Divorce Writer Mom Memoir. That’s because the stories of mothers are not the same as non-parents’ stories, or fathers’ stories. They can’t be. The questions facing mothers navigating divorce are unique, and even more so for moms who are professional writers. The battle line between what is work and what is not, what deserves compensation and what does not, is even thinner, worn away in places.
The frontrunner in this canon is Leslie Jamison’s newest, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, released this February. Jamison, best known for The Empathy Exams, married a fellow writer just as her career began to skyrocket, necessitating her taking her infant on tour as she promoted her latest book. Meanwhile, his new book met with a tepid reception. Cue resentment. Jamison is especially candid about her own failures in the marriage, the ways she allowed her newfound identity as “Mother” to become a wedge between herself and her husband. “My daughter. Our daughter. I was always forgetting that plural pronoun. Not making space for him in our bond” (66). As usual, Jamison’s unsparing candor and brilliant, Didion-esque prose is her superpower. But Splinters’ form is what’s most compelling: a few paragraphs and then white space, as if the writing has been interrupted by a child—snack time, or time to nurse.
That structure, the structure of Interruption, is taken to an even greater extreme in Maggie Smith’s 2023 offering, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Smith is the writer whose poem “Good Bones” became a viral sensation following the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre, and the title, a line from that work, is both a rally cry for the future and an acknowledgement that things are not very good as they are. Smith is less inclined to admit any culpability for her marriage’s failure than Jamison, and she knows it. “Betrayal is neat because it preempts me from having to look, really look, at my marriage” (76). But the heart of the book, as in Jamison’s, is how Smith’s success created tension in their union. Shortly after her poem gains traction, Smith’s husband tells her that she’s “famous.” She denies it—it’s not her who’s famous, it’s the poem. “I said it as a kind of apology, as reassurance, because I felt like I’d been accused of something” (64).
Smith admits that some of her defensiveness comes from her spouse not valuing what she did (his divorce lawyer uses air quotes to refer to her “work”). Yet some of it was already internalized. “I treated my husband’s job as more ‘real,’ more important than mine, too,” she writes (82). It’s a sentiment everyone mothering small children has felt, and everyone who calls themselves a writer (or aspires to) has felt, too. Mothering isn’t work, society says, and neither is writing. But what are they, then? And what are we owed for them?
For Lyz Lenz, journalist and author of This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, what she’s owed is a 50-50 split—and there’s only one way that’s happening. “I had fought so hard for equality in my marriage. I’d pushed for it and bartered and cried and nagged for it. But what got me there in the end was court-mandated joint custody and no longer living with a man” (244).
Lenz’s memoir is less lyrical than the other two, and less nuanced. If Jamison is the most willing to take the heat for her failures, and Smith less so, Lenz barely cops to any blame at all. Frankly, her ex does sound like a piece of work: like Lenz, he hailed from a conservative Christian background with strict notions about patriarchal roles. “It soon became clear that I could be successful or I could be married,” (14) Lenz writes. “I would ask for help, and he would ask me to do less writing—giving up what I’d accomplished” (14).
Lenz skewers her ex much more vigorously than the other two authors here, and this reader reflexively recoiled at her forcefulness before the feminist in me slapped my metaphorical face and told me that women are entitled to their righteous anger just as much as men. Still, our duty as writers is to always leave room for ambiguity, for grace, and for forgiveness, even for those who might, in fact, be unforgivable. It’s our duty as mothers, too.
In all three works, the trials of working as a writer while raising children in a society that doesn’t put much value on either one of these things is the central issue, the main thing that splits the marriages in two. Had Jamison not been touring and promoting, would she have stayed married? If Smith’s poem had not become “famous,” would she still be with her husband today—indeed, would the affair that was, technically, the beginning of the end for them have happened at all? If Lenz was a kindergarten teacher instead of a hustling, hard-driving reporter, with summers off to handle the childcare completely, or if she was a successful businesswoman, pulling in paychecks that rivaled or exceeded his own, would her husband have demeaned her work to the point that she left? It’s impossible to know for sure
In any case, one needn’t be divorcing or writing professionally to find kinship with these women. Tonight an old friend of my husband’s asked me what I was up to lately. I’m a nurse, which I do part-time, so that I can take care of my two young kids, both of whom have special needs, but I’m also finishing up grad school for writing, I told him.
“Well, at least you have the nursing,” he said. “I mean, a real job.”
At least there’s that.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
Little, Brown and Company, 2024, $29.00 (cloth),
ISBN 9780316374880
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
One Signal Publishers, 2023, $28.00 (cloth)
ISBN 9781982185855
This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
Crown, 2024, $28.00 (cloth)
ISBN 9780593241127
Denise Napoli Long is a writer and nurse in New York and is mother to two young boys. She has previously been published in Íntima, Write or Die, and is forthcoming in Ars Medica. She is completing a memoir of her struggles with fertility while working as a hospice nurse.