Amanda Palmer in Conversation with Authors: Leslie Jamison

Presented by Graveside Variety and the Golden Notebook Bookstore, we are please to present Amanda in conversation with authors. The Amanda Palmer x Author Series consists of three afternoons with powerful, honest and critically astute women. This author series will be untamed, uncensored, radically open and each will include a Q&A with Amanda and each author. There will be book signing as well as a curated bookshop table with recommended titles from both Amanda Palmer and the guest author.

Leslie Jamison will be joining Amanda Palmer at 1pm on 6/1 . Her most recent book is Splinters.

Leslie Jamison

Jamison born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she’s lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and (currently) Brooklyn. Jamison has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, a juice barista, a GAP clerk, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world; they're still Leslie. These days she teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.

Her new book, a memoir called Splinters, came out in February 2024. Jamison has also written two essay collections—The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.

About "Splinters"

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: TIME, Oprah Daily, Publishers Weekly, Vogue, Vulture, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, The Story Exchange, The Messenger, Real Simple, How to Be, BookPage

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

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 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, a master of nonfiction, evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

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Amanda Palmer is a best-selling author, feminist, songwriter, community leader, pianist and ukulele-enthusiast who simultaneously embraces and explodes traditional frameworks of music, theatre, and art. She first came to prominence as part of the punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, earning global applause for their inventive songcraft and wide-ranging theatricality. Her solo career has proven equally brave and boundless, featuring such groundbreaking works as the crowd-funded Theatre Is Evil, which made a top 10 debut on the Billboard 200 in 2012 and remains the top-funded original music project on Kickstarter. In 2013 she presented “The Art of Asking” at the annual TED conference, which has been viewed over 20 million times worldwide. Palmer expanded her philosophy into the New York Times best-selling memoir, The Art of Asking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help. Since 2015 Palmer has used the patronage platform Patreon to fund her artwork with an average of 15,000 patrons micro-supporting her creations each month. In 2019 Palmer released her solo album, There Will Be No Intermission, with producer/engineer John Congleton at the helm. She then embarked on a 14-month highly acclaimed international tour of the same name. Both the album and the tour had life, death, abortion, and miscarriage among its tentpole themes.