January 22, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary personal essay “A New Life.” It’s about becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” 

Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

Another:

Up in the mountains, I ran out of baby-food pouches the day before the ceremony. So I walked into town to buy more, the baby snug against me in her carrier, bundled in an eggplant-purple snowsuit, swivelling her head like an owl to look at all the snowy trees. On the walk back, she cried because her cheeks were red and burning from the cold. Why hadn’t I packed more pouches? Every time something went wrong, it was only my fault. I wanted a life that was ninety per cent thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just ten per cent buying pouches of purée. But this was not the life I’d signed up for.

Jamison’s imagery is astounding. On falling in love, she writes, “It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth.” On nursing her baby: “When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.” On divorce: “When I was very young, I thought divorce involved a ceremony, the couple moving backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and then walking separately down the aisle.”

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable! It’s a masterpiece of personal history writing. Highly recommended.

Postscript: The unfurling clementine-peel illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli that accompanies Jamison’s piece is brilliant.