Leslie and Miriam discuss what Leslie's life might have looked like if on a trip to Las Vegas she hadn’t married the man who became her husband and, ultimately father of her daughter, and instead had returned home to New York un-hitched. Along the way they talk about having a complicated relationship with uncertainty, how underlining in books is a love language, and writing at truck-stops at 2am.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She writes for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in in Brooklyn and Splinters, her extraordinary memoir of the end of a marriage and the beginning of motherhood - is out now and available in your local bookshop.

Make sure to subscribe to hear the rest of Season 5 – in each episode, Miriam Robinson interviews a guest about another path their life might have taken. Together, step by step, they write the stories of their unlived lives.

Produced by Neil Mason

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