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Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” is a first-person personal history about the early months of motherhood, the demands of her work, and the end of her marriage. Published by The New Yorker on January 15, 2024, and included in the January 22 print issue, the essay is drawn from her book Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story.
What Leslie Jamison’s essay recounts
Jamison writes about the birth of her daughter and the disorienting work of caring for a newborn while continuing to write and teach. Her account holds tenderness and wonder alongside exhaustion, isolation, and uncertainty. It is a personal story, not a guide to what childbirth or early parenthood is like for everyone.
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Work and caregiving collide when Jamison takes her three-month-old baby on a four-week, eighteen-city book tour. Her mother accompanies them, providing practical and emotional support. The tour is one example of how much help Jamison needed to manage work and infant care at the same time; it is not evidence of a general pattern among working parents.
How the essay connects birth and the marriage’s end
The essay presents the birth as a period in which existing marital tensions and Jamison’s own needs become harder for her to ignore—not as a simple cause of the divorce. She describes her husband’s anger and her growing desire to leave, while weighing what she owed him and their daughter. The story ends with Jamison telling him she is done, a week after she had spoken at a wedding about marriage as reinvention.
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That contrast gives the ending its force: a public reflection on marriage sits beside a private decision to leave. Jamison’s questions—“Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a home with C’s anger? What did I owe his pain? What did I owe my daughter?”—belong to her account of this relationship, rather than offering a rule for other couples.
What the essay says about motherhood and work
Jamison describes love for her daughter and attention to the child’s emerging relationship with the world. She also writes about fatigue, loneliness, and the difficulty of sustaining creative work while caring for an infant. The essay does not reduce motherhood to either fulfillment or sacrifice; it keeps those experiences in view together.
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In a passage about artist Judy Chicago, Jamison quotes Chicago reflecting on the conflict between artistic work and motherhood: “Even if they did succeed, they felt guilty all the time. They felt guilty when they were in their studios. They felt guilty when they were with their children.” The words are Chicago’s as quoted in Jamison’s essay; the passage does not supply an interview date or fuller context for the quotation.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where to read the essay and book
Read “A New Life” at The New Yorker. The magazine identifies it as drawn from Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. The essay is an excerpt, while the book is the longer work from which it comes. Longreads’ presentation also describes the piece as an excerpt and summarizes its arc.
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