Leslie Jamison’s brilliant memoir, Splinters, covers the period of her first marriage and divorce, when she was struggling to cope as a single mother. Noreen Masud’s equally brilliant memoir, A Flat Place, covers a series of journeys she took to flat landscapes in the UK, while trying to come to terms with the cPTSD caused by a damaging childhood and systemic racism. They’re both concerned with the work and learning that we must do when things go wrong in less than optimal circumstances, due to commonplace faults and flaws in humanity. And they parse the fallout of these seemingly everyday events in the most emotionally electric and evocative writing I’ve come across in my summer reading challenge.
In Splinters, Leslie Jamison documents her experiences in three long sections; the first detailing her marriage breakdown and early motherhood, the second her attempts to resume life after the divorce, and the third, single parenting through lockdown and another failed relationship. The granularity of Jamison’s writing is what makes this book, the way she crawls into the heart of an experience and expands it with sensation and meaning. It’s hard to tell you what happens because it’s everything and nothing. Yet she writes so profoundly about daily life and the ordinary miracles, like falling in and out of love and bringing up a baby. She’s also completely candid about herself – her addiction to intensity, her love-hate relationship with performance, her desire for attention. You sense the honesty comes from a lot of time spent in therapy. Jamison’s background is troubled. Her own parents divorced, her father unfaithful and, as a global health economist, never home. Once they’d separated, Jamison only saw him ‘four or five times in six years’, so when he turned up during her seventh grade to berate her about a report card he considered not good enough, it gave her a mission. ‘Whatever the opposite of getting a B- was, I would spend the rest of my life doing that.’ Like many highly intelligent and driven young women, stellar achievement on an unstable foundation came at a cost: an eating disorder and alcoholism.
With those days behind her, this book is about Jamison entering adulthood – or at least performing as brilliant a rendition of it as she can, while trying not to be the agent of her own undoing too many times. When it comes to men, though, I found myself with my head in my hands saying, ‘Oh Leslie, no, no,’ as every partner turned up on the page. Describing the beginning of the relationship with her husband, she says: ‘When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.’ It’s also significant that he was emerging from the tragedy of losing his first wife to cancer. The thought of who she could be for him in the light of this catastrophe is catnip – ‘You are giving me another life,’ he tells her. Her first partner after the divorce is a polyamorous musician on semi-permanent tour whom she calls ‘the tumbleweed’. It’s set up from the start as intense and impossible, with the tumbleweed admitting he can’t do monogamy, and Jamison reading this as an irresistible challenge. The third relationship, which coincides with lockdown, is a guy who works at a hedge fund but started out in academia, whom she calls ‘the ex-philosopher.’ Here was yet another hopeless specimen, stating his credentials upfront as a jaded, serial dater who ‘often described himself as the villain in a rom-com. Like, he was the finance guy you didn’t want the plucky heroine to end up with.’ Oh, Leslie. Such an unerring instinct for identifying the highest hurdle to jump, propelled by the idealistic hope that finally she could achieve a relationship perfect enough to negate the previous disasters. ‘It was good to remember that someone could still think the best of me. To see the gaze of someone I hadn’t yet disappointed.’
It would be unbearable if Jamison weren’t such an insightful commentator on her own existence. ‘The only thing the ex-philosopher and my ex-husband had in common was that both of them invited me to live in the story of our relationship rather than its daily texture,’ she writes. Stories, and the power they have over us is one of the main themes in this memoir. ‘This is one of the lessons I kept learning: the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it; between the story of motherhood and the texture of living it, the story of addiction and the texture of living it.’ Against performative relationships she sets the relentless present moment of mothering a child and the entirely different kind of love it engenders. When her mother arrives at the hospital after Leslie has given birth and takes her daughter in her arms, ‘I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.’
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud is also about a life ruined by paternal and paternalistic damage, but the stakes are much higher. Masud grew up in Pakistan, which shouldn’t be mistaken for the cause of her trauma. Noreen and her three sisters lived in an authoritarian household: ‘we stayed inside and spoke to no one and did nothing and were wholly controlled by my father,’ she writes. This is not the protected situation it might seem: ‘Everything was scary and dangerous and happening right in front of me.’ The control issues included using his children as helpers and attendants during a makeshift operation on their grandfather, conducted on the dining room table, and refusing to recognize her younger sisters epileptic fits as anything other than mere migraines. Her Scottish mother is barely a safer haven, being fully submitted to her husband and unable to stand against him in any way. The situation finally changes when an event happens – we’re never told what because Masud says we wouldn’t be able to read it as any kind of explanatory cause – and her father disowns his eldest three girls, laying the blame on his wife. Masud and her mother move to Scotland to seek refuge with her maternal grandparents.
‘From the outside, I seemed fine,’ Masud writes, telling her therapist, ‘nothing that awful ever happened to me…. Not compared to what happens to some people in Pakistan. I’m a girl with an education. That makes me one of the very, very luckiest people. And everything is okay now, I have a great life. But I just feel so desperate. Like we’re actually all waking through a wasteland and no one can see it except me.’ Masud has educated herself out of danger, with a Cambridge MA and a series of lecturing posts at renowned universities, but she has chronic health problems, panic attacks, and a terror that comes over her when anyone – even people she loves – are nearby. ‘It was very hard to want to be alive every day,’ she writes. Her therapist diagnoses cPTSD. This is the outcome of living with caregivers who are both essential to the child’s survival and also the likeliest source of violence and danger. The damage it causes is immense, and it lies so deeply enmeshed with the fibres of the child’s being that it is a long, hard struggle to heal.
As part of the process, she undertakes a number of trips around the UK to visit flat landscapes. The original flat landscape is an area of green fields outside Lahore that she saw daily on her way to school, but she only realises its importance on a trip to the Fens when she’s studying in Cambridge. This experience has a revelatory impact, and she ends up seeking more flat places, traveling to Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor and the Orkney Islands. The only criticism I have of this memoir is that the flat place has to do an awful lot of heavy lifting. Masud reads so much into it, finding it to be ‘the place of grief but also the place of the real’; ‘a combination of complete exposure and complete withholding’, a place that ‘says nothing and it hides nothing’, and that ‘provide[s] solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling.’ Part of what makes all this a little confusing is that flat places designate something both outside and inside Masud, in the way they ‘mirror the sensations of intensity, blankness and self-sufficiency that had kept me going’, and are ‘something that happens when one’s reality is at odds with that of everyone else. When one’s truth comes starkly into contact with a world which denies it.’
The tone of this memoir is radically different from Jamison’s. Splinters has, in fact, a smoothness to it; the narration is beautiful, calm, measured, full of insight and meaning. A Flat Place is written from a fiercely eloquent place of rage that occasionally collapses into frustrated hopelessness. Leslie Jamison writes wanting to be loved by her audience, Noreen Masud writes with a great big F*ck It banner waving above her head, too tired, too sad, too furious to offer anything other than her experience exactly as she feels it, without making nice.
Reading them both made me think a lot about Melanie Klein’s concept of the Bad Object, a young child’s perception of their caregiver when they are experienced as either withholding or persecutory. The concept lingers on, and we all know that feeling of rage against the person who damages us blithely, indifferently, or even knowingly, by withholding something vital that seems within their power to give. The person who seems dangerously other, hostile and threatening. The person we hate with the child’s absolute passion and terror, scorchingly aware of our vulnerability and need, so that their humanity becomes invisible to us and we only see the harm they do.
No one wants to be the Bad Object. And yet, it is inevitable that we will all be someone’s Bad Object, just as we will always suffer from encountering our own. Online social media is, I think, unhealthily obsessed with the Bad Object, with calling it out, and shaming it and raging about it, and raging about unfair instances of naming Bad Objects that are not, in fact, Bad, or raging about Bad Objects of a Badness that is outrageously obvious and yet allowed to exist unchallenged and unopposed. Bad Objects do bad things to our heads and put us in very bad places.
Her father is one obvious Bad Object for Masud, the other is racism. ‘The bad things were right there in front of me and no one was talking about them,’ she despairs, remembering sketches on the television show Little Britain. ‘Rich, white people. They’re so boring and yet they’re the only ones we ever hear about,’ she sobs to her mother outside a stately home in the Orkneys. And lockdown makes her ‘contemptuous at how weak British people seemed to be.’ Finding during the pandemic the kind of peace and solace she’s never experienced before, Noreen considers that, ‘If white people could rend their hair and wail about not being able to get to the pub, I too had a right to experience certain conditions as intolerable.’ And of course, she has a good point. There is nothing acceptable about the expectation that ‘non-white people should somehow be untraumatised by things which would leave a white person reeling.’ At the basis of this despair is a belief that people are fundamentally Bad Objects: ‘we are kept only very thinly, by laws or reproaches or disapproving looks, from doing terrible things. When society lets us get away with it, we will do them.’
This the inevitable outcome of experiencing hatred at an early age. We learn both sides of any formative relationship. If we’ve been the subject of someone’s powerful hatred, we know how to hate in return. If we grow up in a regime based on submission and domination then it can feel like freedom means being the one in control, dictating terms, able to do to other people what was done to us. Noreen Masud has been made to feel like the Bad Object for most of her life, and there is still a certain sadistic voluptuousness to her self-abandonment, when she feels broken and worthless.
The same sorts of questions about who gets seen and who doesn’t, who gets rescued and who doesn’t and who gets validated and who doesn’t also inform Splinters, but in a much more stealthy way. You could point out that as a privileged white person, Leslie Jamison has much less to complain about, and indeed she performs a sparkly resilience that Masud has no access to. But she also has as suicidal and self-hating a past as Masud, who believes in the absolute limits of empathy – All we can do is believe what people tell us,’ she says. The ghost of being the Bad Object flits around the edges of Splinters, but it’s a different set-up. Jamison’s wit and brilliance, her desperate urge to perform, rescue and excel, are all attempts to avoid the encroaching darkness. She’s running terrified from the prospect of being engulfed in her own badness once again.
Still, Jamison has had more therapy, and rather than seek out flat places, she wheels her baby round art galleries and installations, finding spiritual sustenance and supportive meaning in what she finds there, in the process of thinking through art. Bad object thinking is black and white, good and bad, and art asks so much more of us than that. ‘I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all tell ourselves and others about our own lives,’ she writes. ‘You have to dislodge the cocktail-party version of the story, I said, in order to get to the more complicated version lurking beneath the anecdote: the anger under the nostalgia, the fear under the ambition.’ This is Jamison’s destination: the inclusion of compassionate complexity. There’s a time when she might want to point the finger of blame at her ex-husband, whose anger made her feel so unsafe, but she balances it with the joy her toddler daughter takes from staying with him, the obvious evidence that he’s a great father. She’s aware of her own dysfunction and if she can’t quite change herself, she can at least recognize the healing path. ‘Intellectually, I knew that love wasn’t an assignment – something you could excel at, or make yourself good enough for – that it existed outside these logics of achievement and was more about failure, and wanting, and trying. That it involved being an imperfect version of yourself – grouchy and defensive, telling the same story over and over again – and feeling this self loved, too. Viscerally, I wanted to experience the sort of love that could liberate everyone involved from their hamster-wheels of self-performance.’
I loved both of these memoirs for their hard won wisdom, and for letting us into their ongoing battles, which have so much to say to life as we must all live it these days. ‘We can’t live in this world without damaging or being damaged,’ Masud writes. ‘The point is to be deliberate about which damage to give and take.’ To which I offer Leslie Jamison’s words about the aftermath of that damage: ‘There was no living apart from this grief and no end to it – the mistake had been believing that a good life had to remain unsullied by it.’
