Ahead of her appearance at the Melbourne Writers Festival, best-selling author Leslie Jamison dials in from her home in New York at almost midnight for a meaty chat with Mel about her new memoir, Splinters. Like the title itself, Leslie talks about the fragmented parts that live inside you: "crystallised shards of experience" that lead to "splinters of text". Famously self-scouring and always digging deeper for truth, Leslie talks about new motherhood, marriage, divorce, relationships, the writing process, and how rupture (such as relationships ending) can actually be generative.