Leslie Jamison on Danez Smith, 'Thirst for Salt,' and the Book That She Always Recommends

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Leslie Jamison is no stranger to turning personal experiences into books–The Empathy Exams essay collection recounts her life as a medical actor; essays in Make It Scream, Make It Burn chronicle marriage and motherhood, among other things; and The Recovering examines addiction—hers and that of others. (She’s also drawn on her life for magazines.) Now comes her memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little, Brown).

The DC-born, L.A.-raised, Brooklyn-based NYT-bestselling Iowa Writer’s Workshop alumna has also written a novel, directs the nonfiction concentration at Columbia’s MFA program, was a columnist at The New York Times Book Review, directed an outreach creative writing program through The Bridge for folks struggling with mental health issues and substance dependance, was interviewed by Mary Louise Parker for Interview; has a tattoo in Latin on her arm (Homo sum: Humani nil a me alienum puto, or I am human: Nothing human is alien to me), ran cross-country in middle school and put her Barbies through the ringer.

Likes: Hilma al Klint paintings, exploring on foot and how rain looks falling on water, jumpsuits, photographer Gary Winogrand, sourdough bread bowls, arranging things/orderliness; public baths, Gowanus Canal. Obsessed with: Sylvia Plath. Affected by: Ari Aster’s film Hereditary.

Good at being a baby person and bad at singing, she’s at work on her second novel, The Daughters, and a book about daydreams. Lose yourself in one of her book picks below.

The book that…

…kept me up way too late:

Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild. A bear attack. Siberian winters. Mystical kinship. It gripped me not with its bloodshed but with its reckoning.

…I recommend over and over again:

Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden. In wrestling with Barbara Loden’s film Wanda, this book becomes a deeper reckoning with a mother’s pain—and with the faceless, sourceless grief at the core of experience itself. I love this vision of writing: we don’t write what we choose, but what we can’t escape.

...shaped my worldview:

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”

…I’d like turned into a TV show:

Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. Life in Heian-era Kyoto. Blackened teeth. Twelve-layer robes tuned to the micro-seasons. Except maybe I would call it “Hateful Things” because it is truly one of the best lists ever written.

...has the best title:

Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I mean, who hasn’t?

...I read in one sitting, it was that good:

Madelaine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt. A beach town in winter. An older man. A reckless love affair. A dying dog. How could I put it down?

...made me rethink a long-held belief:

Adam Phillips’ Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. “We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.” This book gave me a way to think about daydreaming, about fantasizing other versions of myself, as something other than emotional infidelity, ingratitude, indulgence, or escapism.

…I’d pass on to my kid:

Kiki Petrosino’s Bright: A Memoir. About whiteness, brightness, popular girls, and mirrors. The tainted honeysuckle of the American dream.

…I’d give to a new graduate:

Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Don’t just live the situation of your life, try to understand its story. What are the stakes and secrets of what is happening to you?

...has the best opening line:

Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems.

“somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown

as rye play the dozens & ball, jump

in the air and stay there.”

…has a sex scene that will make you blush:

Maggie Millner’s Couplets: A Love Story. Wrists tied to an IKEA bed. “Sometimes when I lay there, waiting, bound or free, / I’d envision its assembly…”

…describes a place I’d want to visit:

Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. Rival cities devoted to words and numbers? An island of conclusions that you can jump to? Yes, please. I’ve always been a sucker for a hand-drawn map at the beginning of a book, and I think my love began here.

...I’ve re-read the most:

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I would say, “I don’t believe in a perfect book,” but then this one exists. Caregiving and grief. Deep yearning and unexpected sustenance.

…I would have blurbed if asked:

Madame Bovary. If Flaubert had found his way to my inbox…lol.

…I never returned to the library (mea culpa):

Saint Augustine’s The Confessions. He stole a pear from the pear tree just for the pleasure of stealing a pear from the pear tree. I stole a…

...taught me this Jeopardy!-worthy bit of trivia:

In Carl Erik Fisher’s fascinating history of addiction, The Urge, I learned the word monocausotaxophilia: coined by a German brain researcher named Ernst Pöppel, it refers to “the love of single causes that explain everything.” I mean, the word pretty much…explains everything.

Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:

Midnight Special. Santa Monica temple. RIP.

The literary organization/charity I support:

We Are Not Numbers.

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