In this memorable piece, Jamison writes about two tightly interwoven experiences – the birth of her daughter and the death of her marriage. It begins,
The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases.
Note the specificity – “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.” It’s a hallmark of Jamison’s pungent, vivid style.
The piece is beautifully structured, unfolding in month-by-month stages of the baby’s development: the first few weeks (“Life was little more than a thin stream of milk connecting my body to hers, occasionally interrupted by a peanut-butter sandwich”); two months old (“Three, four, five days a week, we walked to the Brooklyn Museum. Going to the museum was a way to saturate our endless hours with beauty”). When the baby is three months old, Jamison takes her on a book tour. Her mother goes with them:
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.
That “The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin” is inspired.
The “book tour” description also contains this wonderful passage:
In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library.
When the baby is six months old, Jamison takes her to a writing workshop she’s conducting. Her husband stays with the baby in a hotel a block away from where the class is being held. Jamison gets so caught up in the workshop (“I felt intensely, almost ferociously present”), she forgets that at a certain point she’s supposed to call a break and get back to the hotel to breast-feed 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.
My favorite part of “A New Life” is the scene at a reading in Toronto in which Jamison is being interviewed on a stage directly across from the room where a publicist is watching her baby. The walls are glass. Jamison can see them (“It was like watching a silent movie in which another woman was actually the mother of my child”). She writes,
At first, my daughter was happily slamming her fists against a wooden conference table, but then she started to get fussy. Put her in the carrier, I thought. The woman picked her up and started bouncing her around the room. Nope, I thought. You gotta use the carrier. My daughter started crying. But the glass was thick! I couldn’t hear a thing. It was as if someone had pressed the Mute button on her. The woman picked up the carrier, clearly confused by it. You have to clasp the buckle around your waist before you do the shoulder straps, I thought. The woman interviewing me asked a question about how I excavated profundity from banality. No, the big buckle, I thought, watching the woman in the glass room try to put my daughter in the carrier before she had the waistband fully cinched. I had to force myself to look away, and when I looked back my daughter was settled in the carrier. She looked peaceful.
Jamison’s account of becoming a parent is the main strand. But there’s a secondary thread – her disintegrating marriage and the question of whether she should try to save it. At one point, she writes,
The idea that we both felt so many of the same painful things didn’t help me believe that the marriage was more possible to save. It became harder and harder to convince myself that our good months in the beginning mattered more than all the friction that followed. It seemed like the good place we were trying to get back to was just a small sliver of what we were.
In the piece’s final section, an account of a friend’s wedding she’s attending, she resolves the issue:
At the ceremony, I gave a speech to the assembled crowd. Marriage is not just about continuing but reinventing. Always being at the brink of something new. Delivering this ode, I felt like a fraud. I had reached the end of reinventing. A voice inside me said, You are a liar. You have not done enough. A week later, I would tell C—in our basement therapy—that I was done. At that wedding in the mountains, the words I’d offered as a homily had been an elegy hidden in plain sight.
My summary of this great piece fails to do it justice. I’ve omitted so many glorious details – the smell of oranges, the blue mesh hospital underwear, the Saskatchewan Shuffle, Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” on and on. It’s one of the best “Personal History” pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker.
Credit: The above illustration is by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (The New Yorker, January 22, 2024).
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