The essayist Leslie Jamison has become known for her careful balancing acts of self-exposure.

Leslie Jamison’s work often includes intensely personal details woven together with reporting and criticism. Her new memoir “Splinters” is her first book drawn entirely from her own experience. Credit... Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

“If the self is a guesthouse, most of the rooms are full of ghosts,” Leslie Jamison said on a recent Monday afternoon in a Columbia University lecture hall. Ms. Jamison, wearing an ethereal blue maxi dress, stood before a projector screen showing 19th-century spirit photography. “Being haunted can be a state of abundance,” she said. “Living in the ghost hotel is a state of abundance. Memories are raw material.”

One does not check into a ghost hotel without taking inventory of its specters: “Who are you haunted by?” Ms. Jamison told her students to ask themselves. “What versions of yourself are you haunted by? What moments are you haunted by?”

Ms. Jamison’s graduate course is called “The Self” and addresses the challenges of writing in the first person. Each class tackles a different self that can come through in a work: There is the “loving self” in relationships; the “shameful self,” who reckons with pain; the “self at risk,” who is in peril; and, during class that Monday, the “haunted self,” who lives in the aftermath of disaster and must confront the past.

Ms. Jamison said she became acquainted with each of these while writing her new memoir, “Splinters,” which recounts the birth of her child and the end of her marriage. Her writing often includes intensely personal details — in “The Empathy Exams” she wrote about her excessive drinking and an abortion, and in “The Recovering” she shared an unvarnished account of her path to sobriety. But this is her first book drawn entirely from her own life, without the essayistic pivots between criticism and reportage that made her name in literary circles alongside writers like Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay and Eula Biss.

“Part of what spoke to me in the form of ‘Splinters’ was this idea of accessing something different by staying so close to the body and lived experience,” Ms. Jamison, 40, said.

But her character on the page, she added, is a “partial, built thing.”

“Who I am in ‘Splinters,’ yes, is me — I lived all of those things,” she said. “But at the same time, I’m choosing what that narrator does and says and is on the page, and building her piece by piece.”

“Splinters,” published this month, is an account of the birth of Ms. Jamison’s daughter and the dissolution of her marriage told in shard-like vignettes.

Her raw material is this: Ms. Jamison grew up in Los Angeles, and knew from a young age that she wanted to write even before she could physically do so, enlisting her two older brothers to write down the stories she told them. She left the West Coast to attend Harvard and then moved to Iowa City for an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; from there, she pursued a Ph.D in English at Yale. But she says she completed her debut novel, “The Gin Closet,” while working as an innkeeper in her hometown — one of a handful of odd jobs she’s had, including baker, office temp, juice barista, Gap sales clerk and medical actor. Her breakout essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” followed four years later.

That spring, at a writers’ work space near Union Square in Manhattan, she met the writer Charles Bock, who appears in “Splinters” as “C.” They got married just a few months later, and settled down in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The marital troubles began after the birth of their daughter and the publication of “The Recovering” in 2018, she writes in the memoir, when she and Mr. Bock became emotionally distant. “Our home was a place in which I’d come to feel alone, and so — in retaliation, or from depletion — I made C feel alone, too,” she writes. “His barbed comments left me so frayed that I stopped trying to detect or soothe the hurt beneath them.”

After separating in 2019, she began to take notes for “Splinters” while living in a sublet next to a firehouse, where she felt the grief of rupture alongside a “sense of hope and deep love,” she said. She wanted to explore those seemingly contradictory feelings on the page.

In her memoir, Ms. Jamison breaks these life events into shards for the reader to piece together over the course of the book. By writing in short, intense vignettes, she said, “it felt like I broke open something in my language,” and discovered a new way of writing. “That’s always the feeling that I want.”

Less than an hour after Ms. Jamison’s daughter is born, on Page 9, a nurse takes the baby down the hall to receive treatment for jaundice. It takes another nurse’s words of comfort for Ms. Jamison to feel the tears on her cheeks. After a little while, Ms. Jamison writes, she wheels her IV pole down the hall to observe her daughter blue-lit under the nursery’s bilirubin lights.

Forty pages later, she reveals that during that “little while,” she had pulled out her laptop and continued fact-checking an essay on female rage from her hospital bed, “bleary with shame and pride.” Having finished copy edits just before her water broke, she had planned to continue working from the hospital.

“Why did it feel somehow like saying, ‘I got to work and I was glad to get to work’?” she asked. “Why does that threaten to invalidate the feeling of sadness that I narrate the first time?”

The revelations that arrive in “Splinters” are not the payoff; instead, Ms. Jamison sees the thrill of narrative as “dramatizing the process of getting there,” she said, and “getting to watch thought become suspicious of itself, but then still be hungry for some sort of meaning.”

Ms. Jamison said she saw the first-person perspective as a way to understand other people’s humanity. She set out to prove that “personal narrative doesn’t have to be as solipsistic as we think it is.”Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

Ms. Jamison arrived on the literary scene when the hybrid essay was becoming more popular in the wake of “It Happened to Me”-style confessional essays that populated blogs the decade before, often relying on writers to expose their deepest wounds for page views.

“There was a moment, sometime between 2008 and 2010, when a woman’s insides — her exploits, her eating habits, her feelings, her sex life — became a lucrative internet product,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a review of “How to Murder Your Life,” the 2017 memoir by Cat Marnell, a former beauty editor at xoJane, which became known for that form of personal writing.

In a workshop at the end of her M.F.A., Ms. Jamison said she had tried to write these self-lacerating essays. But she found them claustrophobic and felt they didn’t make room for the range of feelings she wanted to convey. Incorporating journalism and criticism made the personal essay feel more outward-looking, she said. Ms. Jamison set out to prove that “personal narrative doesn’t have to be as solipsistic as we think it is.”

That has earned her a devoted following. The rise of the hybrid essay “coincided with a rise in the creative nonfiction programs across the country,” said Jan Weissmiller, a poet and an owner of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, where Ms. Jamison drafted parts of “The Empathy Exams.” Ms. Weissmiller said that book “was formative for all those young people that were studying and starting to write that way.”

Ms. Jamison is one of 30 or so writers who Michael Taeckens, the former marketing director of Graywolf Press, said had “spawned legions of imitators” — or at least legions of young writers and students who want to learn the secrets of this genre-bending high-wire act.

Emmeline Clein, a former student of Ms. Jamison’s whose forthcoming book “Dead Weight” recounts her struggle with an eating disorder, said Ms. Jamison was the first writer she read who captured “a certain type of human void that manifests in emotional and mental distress,” and whose approach “is grounded in research but is very human and lived.”

Anika Jade Levy, the co-editor of Forever Magazine, marveled over Ms. Jamison’s “ability to intellectualize her own experiences without diluting their emotional resonances.” Madelaine Lucas, another former Columbia student, said Ms. Jamison’s 2014 essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” — about women who numb themselves to avoid seeming melodramatic — is “maybe not a battle cry, but something that spoke to a particular generation of women.”

This semester, all but three of the 60 students in Ms. Jamison’s course are women, many of them longtime Leslie-heads who applied to the program hoping to work with her.

Ms. Jamison’s life looks much different now than it does in the pages of “Splinters.” These days, she lives with a partner in Brooklyn and splits the week between what she calls “outward”-facing days teaching at Columbia and internet-free writing days at home, where she is working on a novel, a book about daydreaming and a version of her “Self” lectures to publish widely. Friday afternoons are reserved for time with her daughter, who is now in kindergarten.

Ms. Jamison said she tries to bring some of the vulnerability she uses in her books to her classroom to show students that she, too, has skin in the game. She talks openly about addiction, anorexia and unhealthy relationships. “People are just so much more ready and willing and eager to share parts of themselves because they already feel like they’re on this particular radio channel with you,” she said.

During a 10-minute break, she asked her students to respond to a writing prompt about “haunted sweetness.” When class resumed, students talked about learning to sew and embarking upon ill-advised affairs.

“To believe in writing from a first-person perspective is not just about believing in your own first person,” Ms. Jamison said later, during an interview in her tidy, bohemian office, where a colleague’s origami mobile hangs from a shelf. “It’s literally about believing in the richness of anybody’s subjectivity.”

She recounted how she had read a biography of the 19th-century mathematician Georg Cantor as a child, an attempt to impress one of her older brothers. One of Cantor’s great discoveries was that there were different types of infinities.

In writing creative nonfiction, she said, there’s one kind of infinity available in examining one’s life alongside the lives of others, something she hopes she manages to capture in her essays.

“Then there’s this other kind of infinity — that’s not a lesser infinity, it’s just a different infinity — that’s between zero and one,” she said, “when you’re hewing closer to your own experience.”

Back in the classroom, Ms. Jamison recounted an anecdote about an apple farmer who coined the term “ghost apples” to describe the icy formations he noticed growing in his orchard. During a cold snap in Michigan, the farmer realized that his apples had turned to mush and escaped their icy shells, leaving behind perfect crystalline forms.

“When I think of writing the moments that haunt me, I think of these ghost apples,” Ms. Jamison said. “How to let the excess drop away, the mush and skin of what happened but isn’t necessary to the telling.”