We are thrilled to welcome the brilliant Leslie Jamison (Make it Scream, Make it Burn, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams) to the bookstore to discuss her first memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. Essayist, and Bainbridge Island favorite Jon Mooallem will join Jamison to discuss literary craft and questions of motherhood, art, and new love.

This event is offered as a fundraiser for the upcoming first annual Bainbridge Book Festival, happening this Fall on Bainbridge Island. A portion of all sales during this event will be donated to BBF.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material – scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books – Splinters enters a new realm. In this powerful memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception toward some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. Placing the magical and the mundane side by side, Splinters reckons with the muchness of life and art and grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Please RSVP to attend.

RSVP: JamisonAndMooallem