Leslie Jamison, Ph.D. 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: Another Kind of Love Story enters a new realm.

In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on 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. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that 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, full of linguistic daring and emotional acuity.

Jamison will be in conversation with Ashley C. Ford, the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter. Ford is the former co-host of the HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, and the current host of Ben & Jerry’s Into The Mix.

This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.

BONUS AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Splinters from FAN’s partner bookseller The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Jamison and Ford that will start immediately after the webinar. Details on the webinar registration page.