"Motherhood Gave Me The Gift of Desperation"

A Conversation with Nicole Graev Lipson

Almost exactly five years ago, when everything shut down except hospitals and motherhood, there was a stretch of time when I just couldn’t read. I had been in the middle of a book that, against a backdrop of fear and death and Cosmic Kids Yoga, I retained zero interest in finishing. Eventually, I picked up a copy of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai that had been sitting on my nightstand and it ended up being a novel about a plague that got me reading again. Then, because it seemed like the kind of time that would end up being a capsule, I decided to start keeping a list of the books I would read during this plague. I thought I would eventually abandon the project but, because everything feels like a capsule now and my brain no longer retains information the way it used to, I’ve kept it going. I like having a record.

Why am I telling you this? Well, lately I’ve worried that the list may have become a kind of compulsion, like a reading Fitbit. I sometimes find myself grabbing a subpar celebrity-adjacent memoir or a novel I know will be a page-turner to keep up a pace that has no meaning other than it was what I was able to maintain last year. On the other hand, I can see how this drive to keep reading is saving me from tumbling into the abyss of my phone and Miranda July just reminded me that meaty, page-turning novels are part of a balanced life.

A good and non-celebrity-adjacent memoir (unless you consider Merve a celebrity, a stance I honor and validate) I read recently was Bibliophobia, by Sarah Chihaya, in which the threads of loving literature, trying to make a career out of it, and mental illness are interwoven. The book is also academic quit lit, for those who like or need that sort of thing. Chihaya’s account of “living through books” made me think about why we read, and how the answer to that question has a tendency to change over time. When I ask my kids why they love reading they say, “it’s relaxing” or “it’s fun” or “because you get to know the characters’ lives and events that aren’t in your own” or “because I don’t like going to bed.” But I know that if they remain voracious readers, at some point they will have different, or additional, answers to that question. When do we start reading our own lives into the books we consume, or superimposing plots and narrative constructs on our experiences? When do we start indulging in what Chihaya calls the “desire to shape life into self-serving fictions”?

It’s a tricky business, being bookish from a young age, and I’m always fascinated by the way other people use the stories that have obsessed them to understand their own lives. Like Bibliophobia, Pushcart winner and Best American essayist Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is an attempt by a lover of literature to understand the shape of her life, and contemporary womanhood, through the lens of the literary voices that have sustained and challenged her. Lipson’s gaze is steady and wide-ranging; her essays are smart and a real treat. You’ll want to read on for our conversation about her frustration with the term “mother book,” the “spiral staircase” as a form for writing parenthood, and our deep, deep need for solitude.

Photo credit: Bella Wang

You started your professional life as a high school English teacher and then decided to shift to writing full time. What was that transition like?

As long as I can remember, I loved writing. It was always my favorite subject in school up and I was the editor of the literary magazine and an English major in college. And I discovered the essay form in college because I stumbled into this class with this incredible, kind of notorious professor named Lydia Fakundiny, who taught this course called The Art of the Essay. My knowledge of the essay before that had been the thing with five paragraphs to prove to my teachers that I knew what they wanted me to do. It was a formula. As soon as we started reading essays by Baldwin and Cynthia Ozick and Joan Didion, I just felt like I had found my genre. Maybe a lot of writers feel this in some regard, but I'd always just sort of felt a little out of step with the world, a little confused what we're supposed to be doing here. Everyone else seemed to have gotten the memo, but I didn't. And what I loved about the essay was that it was just the space where you could be confused on the paper. It allowed me to see into other people's real consciousness in a way that fiction definitely does too, but it was so concrete and laid bare for me. So this is almost embarrassing to say because who is like, ‘I'm going to be an essayist!’ when they're in college? But no one's recruiting you to be an essayist. So I did what I think a lot of writers do, and it was the sensible choice. My first job was in book publishing. I worked as an editorial assistant in New York City, and I was there for four years and then was freelance writing while I was doing that, and I still saw all of this as a stepping-stone to writing. I was writing book reviews. I was writing pieces for Marie Claire. But again, that step from how do I get from freelancing and these more service-oriented pieces to doing the-

There’s no clear path, really.

Right, so I worked in book publishing. I loved it in many ways, even though I sort of knew in my heart it wasn't where I wanted to land ultimately. And then I did go into teaching and I taught high school English for many years and loved that and also continued to write more on the side. I think I just always sort of felt like I had time. ‘I am doing this work that I love and I will get to writing one day. It will happen.’ And then almost counterintuitively, once I had children, and I write about this in the book, there absolutely was a time where I could not write. I was so consumed not simply by the tasks of motherhood, but by the drive or desire to do this motherhood thing well, to so fully embody that role that I really did not have the mental space, the creative space to write. But once my youngest child turned two or three – and I really have never had an experience like this before in my life – I was overcome by a full body, white hot fire in my belly to do the thing I had always wanted to do. I'm not sure I've had a feeling this sort of strong and encompassing before, and I doubt I'll ever have it again.

I can really relate to that whole writing as a hazy thing in the future and also the experience of not really figuring out how I wanted to do it until basically the most inconvenient time, with two, almost three, small children.

It is inconvenient. And here's what I think is so interesting is there is this idea that the tasks of caregiving can pull you away from your creative work, your intellectual work, as a parent, and particularly as a mother. And that was true. But I think what motherhood also did for me was give me the gift of desperation to say that it made me realize in ways that I had never before, that time is finite and that it marches on and that it is really up to us to use it as our heart most longs to use it. And I think I sort of saw the future before me with my children and the way it could go and another path, the way I wanted it to go.

And so when you have this kind of revelatory moment, does it come with, ‘And this is what I want to write about’? I'm wondering if parenthood didn't kind of shape you in terms of seeing the finite nature of time, but also, realizing, ‘And here is the subject I was always meant to write about.’

Yes, absolutely. And I think what I felt was that becoming a mother, experiencing those first years of motherhood intensified every single thing that I cared about before I was a mother, because now I was seeing it not just through the lens of my own self and my own concerns, but through the lens of these people, my children, who I loved more than anything in the world and was charged with caring for and raising. And so just to give you an example: it’s one thing for our culture's, misogynistic beauty standards to turn me against my own body. That was something that I had struggled with for years. I had struggled with an eating disorder and struggled with beauty expectations in so many of the ways that women in our culture are do. But to think of my own daughters ever turning against their bodies because of messages that they were receiving from our culture, galvanized me and fueled me and energized me in a whole new way.

Exactly, seeing the world the way someone brand new would see it and being, you know, a little disgusted.

And I think it also enabled me to write about these issues, not just intellectually, which had formerly been my mode of processing as sort of analyzing, reflecting. And my writing absolutely does that, but it also came from this place of deep feeling. And I was so moved to write about these things in a way that brought that feeling into it. And so I started just experiencing life with my children, with my husband, and it impacted and colored the way I saw the world and the world impacted and colored the way I saw my family. And all of that was so rich and interesting to me and something that I was definitely very moved to write. So that's a long way to answer your question, which is to say yes, I think it was these two things in tandem, this sort of gift of desperation and this feeling of urgency of message because I was personally activated by the threats to my children and their futures that they face and are going to continue to face in our culture.

So you start writing these essays, did you always envision it as a book, as a memoir in essays, or was it just one essay at a time and then one day you realized, hey, this could be a book?

Yeah, the first few essays were conceived of as standalone essays. And it wasn't long before I started to notice that they were circling around similar themes. Once I started saying I could see these coming together, I could see this as a germ of a book project – essays that existed could exist and could be read separately but that would follow a continuous thread or an overarching narrative arc – that informed what I wrote after that.

Yeah, I was struck by the fact that there isn’t any kind of flashy hook beyond, you know, these are really good essays about being a woman and a mother, which I would think would be hard to sell in these times without packaging it as something else.

Yeah, my book does not have a flashy hook. And I actually have an essay that I wrote coming out about this, that there is a lot of oversimplification in the categories that the publishing industry uses generally. And I think this definitely applies when we're talking about the “mother book” and that any book that sort of explores motherhood in any way or has the word mother in some form in the title is going to get categorized as a mother book, which to me is frustrating for a number of reasons but one being that motherhood intersects with every other aspect of the human condition. It in some ways offers a front row seat to so many of the other things that great literature has always concerned itself with. So, love, death, illness, betrayal.

You’ve got everything.

Everything is wrapped up in there. So I think that one thing about my book is that it is in parts very much about motherhood, and there are definitely some sections of the book where I am explicitly writing about motherhood. But what I really wanted to explore and get at was the many fictional characters, fictional roles, kind of reductive templates that are imposed on girls and women over the course of the female lifespan. And that yes, motherhood is one kind of idealized role, a sort of performance, but that it is one of many that we move through as we age through the stages of life. And once a girl has graduated from girlhood, it's not long before she's sort of the sexualized ingenue maiden, and then it's like the fork in the road to becoming a mother, an idealized mother, or a maligned cat lady.

Those are the two options.

Those are the two options. And then the road goes on until everyone becomes either an invisible, irrelevant, older woman or sort of like a witchy, maligned crone.

I tend to think we’re all headed to cronehood, but I guess I’m an optimist.

I think that if there was any splashy argument my book makes, it's that it is still, in 2025, somewhat radical to claim that a woman is a full complex human being. And that's the central project of my book, motherhood and mothers being one of the archetypes that I am exploring and trying to get under the hood of.

You have a great essay on friendship, which opens with a certain wedding photo of you, your husband, and your best friend. And you write about how, if you were a fiction writer, you might use that photo as inspiration for a tale of rivalry between a husband and a best friend, both vying for the heroin's affections. I’m interested in that implied contrast between what you would have to do to your story to turn it into a page-turning novel and what is available to you as an essayist. People often think of fiction writing as a kind of freedom, a place to turn the personal into something else, but is there something freeing about memoir? Is writing memoir a challenge or a relief or a little bit of both?

So fiction personally absolutely terrifies me. I've tried to write fiction and I feel almost like I'm agoraphobic and I'm standing in the middle of a wide open field that extends to the horizon, and I have nothing to give me my bearings. So I personally love the guardrails of nonfiction, that there are these sort of stakes in the ground places that I know I want to get to, always going back to the facts, the truth, the memories to anchor me. And I feel like life gives me so much to sort through and grapple with that as a writer. That's where my mind goes, is thinking through these things that have already happened. And I'll probably botch this quote, but I think it was Andre Dubus III who wrote something like, memoir isn't writing about what happened, it's writing about what the hell happened. And it's sort of like the sheer passing of one's existence is so fast that I feel like it demands to constantly be sorted out.

Right, the speed. The essays take place at different points in time in your mothering journey and so they end up being kind of like snapshots of these people who are constantly changing. The kid in that essay is not the kid in the other essay and is not the kid who is sitting across from you at the dinner table when you stop writing that night or whatever. I’m interested in that idea of an essay as a moment in time when parenting is this ongoing thing. And I guess that’s tied to the question of what's your approach to writing about your children and whether that's changed as they've grown and changed.

I love that you point out that these are snapshots because I think this definitely happens to me as a reader of memoir, that you feel somehow that you've gotten the whole story. Like, ‘I really know this author.’ I've seen that happen to authors at events, this feeling that people now have gotten this window into your life.

It's a real occupational hazard, right? When in reality it's like that picture of the iceberg where you see the little bit above the water but most of it is still submerged.

And not just that, but these are highly, highly curated depictions of my loved ones, the people in my life, and they're also constructed out of language. And so there's a very big divide to me between the character of my husband that I am recreating on the page through language and the very real, true flesh and blood man who sleeps in my bed with me. And that said, they're not entirely divorced and in writing about my children or about my husband or my friends or anyone in my life. First and foremost, and I think I'm sure you've heard this from other writers of memoir, but I think most of us do try or insist on writing our stories. So, obviously, as humans, our lives intersect with other human beings, but I am not going to ever claim that I can know what is going on inside of my child's head. I can't claim to know what's going on in my husband's head. I can only put forth my perceptions, which as we know, as humans, can very often be misconceptions. But I'm writing about what I can see, feel, touch, hear, smell directly as a person. And so for me, that is one way of respecting and honoring the humanity and the dignity of the people that I'm writing about. And then my daughter, her school has this great social emotional program and she came home one day a few years ago with this acronym, and it was called THINK, and it was like, before you say something, and the acronym was like, is it true? Is it helpful? And then it jumps to N – it necessary and is it kind? And I've sort of tried to put my own writing to the THINK test. Everything is true, I'm writing nonfiction. Is it helpful? Am I using this material to be helpful to my readers in some way? And I don't mean that in terms of a self-help book.

That’s an interesting question to apply because personal writing is about the self but it’s also meant to be for somebody else. What do we think its purpose is for that somebody else?

I'm just kind of realizing this now as I say it, I do also think of helpful on a more personal level as well in the sense of: would having this conversation with this person that I'm writing about in an honest and loving way be constructive? And if not, then I'm not going to write about it.

That's really interesting to me because that implies that the person would want to have the conversation. So if you think that person wants to have this conversation, then it's fair game to write about.

Yes. And I actually don't write about anything that I think a person would want to have a conversation about without having the conversation with them. I think that there's this assumption that writing about other people is a risky thing in a negative way. Are people going to feel like you violated their privacy? Especially if you're writing about your children, are you using your children? Is this exploitation?

Right, material and all that.

And I have found that – and maybe I'm lucky this way – but anything in my book that I'm like, I think I should have a conversation with, fill in the blank, my mother, my oldest child about this and tell them that I want to write about this. And then what it has done is open up a conversation about the thing. And that itself has brought about a level of intimacy or communication that has deepened the relationship in some way. I interviewed this artist a few years ago who's a photographer and she has a series called Cousins where she photographs her daughter and her niece in their close friendship. These are very kind of intimate portraits of girlhood but she did it starting when they were really little.

I love that.

Until they were in their twenties. And I asked her- in visual arts, there's sort of like that same assumption that if you're using your children in your work, that it's sort of exploitative in some way. And she said, ‘I have gotten that a few times, but when I was little, I would have killed for somebody to pay such close loving attention to me as I am paying to these girls through my art and my photography. And they feel honored, they feel seen.’ So what would it mean to reframe the ‘you are using your children’ to ‘you are showing love to your children by paying them deep, deep attention,’ which is what- the poet Mary Oliver says, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

And it's not just the attention, it's that they are a subject worthy of exploration, of deep thinking. And that makes me think about what I took to be one of the central exercises of the book, which is being a ‘thinking mother,’ which apparently is something that people are surprised to find out exists. Cassie Mannes Murray wrote in a recent post that your book taught her that a person can have an intellectual life while being a mother and hopefully this book will help a lot of people with that. I was reading the book on “vacation” where I had a lot of togetherness with my children, and there was one line that really nailed it: “There's no recognition in this sentimentalized version of motherhood, of the complicated, nuanced mental work raising humans actually demands.” And then I went through this vacation really alert to all the different kinds of interactions that I have to have as a parent, you know, where you're kind of like a hostage negotiator with the 3-year-old and then explaining things in which I am not an expert- in the same afternoon I'm having to explain why there aren’t more species of human beings like there are birds-

Like a naturalist.

Yes, nature and evolution. And then also why does war exist? When was the first war? I have to be an ancient historian. And then right after that I need to figure out how to talk about beauty standards. It’s a lot.

And you have to have so much insight, too, into psychology.

Exactly, what is appropriate for- who's asking me this question? Is it the 12-year-old? Is it the 7-year-old? Because there are different answers depending on who it is and just getting through any single day requires this kind of mental acrobatics.

I think there is this age-old kind of privileging of one kind of thinking over another kind of thinking. And the sort of denigration of what- the philosopher Sarah Ruddick came up with the term maternal thinking, which is kind of the process a mother or caregiver goes through in doing exactly the things that you just described. The sort of learning from error, the refining of hypotheses, the trial and error, the observation, reflection, all the things that go into any discipline. Before the pandemic, I had an occasional babysitter who was a senior at a college near us. She's a very good student and was definitely planning to go on to land her first great entry level job. So when the pandemic hit, and then that summer afterward, it was one of those things where you couldn't really come and go. So I was like, ‘Alice, you are done with school, do you want to just move in with us?’ She ended up staying with us as a nanny for a full year and a half. And she and I talked really honestly about what she did in caring for my children when I was working and writing with three pretty young kids at that time – the thinking ahead, the negotiating, just teaching them and coming up with stimulating activities for them. And she herself was like, I would be so happy to stay on here but she felt this pressure to move on with the real job. And I said, no one understands how much thinking this job requires.

You were talking about McKinsey earlier, right? This is the ultimate project management consulting except you also have to wipe people's butts.

She went on to become a consultant.

And was probably very well prepared for it.

She was very well prepared, but she was worried that she wasn't going to be, that working for us wasn’t going to be good on the resume, right? There's still these sexist assumptions around care work and what it involves.

And the literary version of that, is, what counts as a hero's journey. You have a beautiful essay on masculinity and raising sons. I love the essay, but I was struck by a line that may be a little bit beside the point: “It takes great courage, I'm discovering, to help one's children become who they really are. This is the mother journey that calls to me, the heroism I long to summon.” The classic hero’s journey we find in the Odyssey, for example, isn’t really compatible with motherhood, or it hasn't been historically. You bring up the more modern examples of Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert, who both of whom wrote their memoirs before becoming a parent. And I was also thinking about how those stories have an end point, which is often returning home or arriving at a new home. And so then I'm wondering how we write about this different kind of journey which I guess ends with children becoming adults, which means that it really doesn't end, or it ends with them on their therapist's couch, talking about you. Getting home from getting home to Ithaca seems a lot more straightforward compared to that. So I'm wondering, are these snapshots one answer to that need for a new form?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a circular- a spiral, like an iterative journey. I feel like motherhood, caregiving, it's more you start out and then you're going along and you encounter something, and then more time goes on, and then you kind of circle back to it, but understand it better or in a new way for having experienced it before. And that this spiral is a spiral staircase like you are learning and you're growing, but you are circling back, looping back onto your own experiences. And that's also why this particular form felt right for me for this book, the memoir in essays, because I don't experience life, and definitely not as a mother, as a sort of linear progression. I very much experience it in episodes that only in retrospect or looking back or kind of circling back around in that spiral, do I see the thread that runs through them. So yeah, it definitely does look different than the Freytag’s pyramid sort of exposition, rising action, climax,

They all lived happily ever after. Or not.

Yeah, it's not exactly like that. And our days aren't either, right? Even on a granular level, any given day, it is that same sort of circling and cycling.

Unload the dishwasher, reload the dishwasher. Speaking of those busy and circular routines, you have a wonderful essay on solitude. Mothers’ autonomous time, as you call it, or, as I like to put it, time to be a person. I feel like I'm constantly saying, ‘I just need time to be a person,’ with the implication that I am not a person while I am mothering, or that I associate personhood with being alone and not even with other adults. I need to be by myself. You argue that time alone is actually an integral part of being a human being, which made me feel better. The essay explores narratives of female aloneness, like Strayed’s and Gilbert’s, but also stories of mothers who crave and somehow find solitude, like The Awakening and Doris Lessing’s “To Room 19,” in which – and I love this – the protagonist would rather have her husband think that she is having an affair than reveal that she just needs to be alone.

Isn't that amazing? That there’s something so weird and perverse about renting a hotel room and just spending time there with yourself. And this story is set in the 1960s but I think that that is true to this day.

Yes! I think it's still true. My husband's always kind of joking about how my favorite thing is to be alone, I hate my family, etc. It’s a joke but it’s edged with a bit of fear and bewilderment, I think. I sometimes throw myself these writing retreats, and he'll be like, ‘Well, are you going to meet friends for dinner while you’re away?’ And I'm like, ‘Maybe? But also I’d really rather not.’

A hundred percent. My husband does the same thing.

And I love my friends. I love them, and I don't get to spend enough time with them. But this is a different and very deep need. And also, I need to point out, as you do in the essay, that both The Awakening and “To Room 19” end in suicide, this idea that death is the only option for a mother who needs to be by herself. I think the more modern version is what we see in a novel like All Fours, which many people have read, and Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor, which I think fewer people have read, about a woman who goes overseas to help her aging mother and is separated from her two children in the early days of the pandemic. And the protagonist wonders whether she actually knew that this was going to happen. And did she kind of a little bit do this on purpose, going deal with her mother's health issues when she heard there might be a deadly virus on the horizon? All Fours begins in the same way, with a pretense or a good reason to leave, with the implication that solitude is not something we can take outright without judgment.

Totally. And I think there are some culturally sanctioned forms of maternal solitude, I think, or awareness from the family. I think it's much more understandable, in a heterosexual marriage, that I'm going to go get a pedicure, or I'm going to go do a mom's night out.

Being away from your children if it's a girls' trip. Of course, everybody needs friendship.

I think the cover of exercise, there's certain things that we all need to take care of our bodies. You can go to a yoga class or go for a run. But I think just solitude for the sake of solitude. There is still a lot of stigma.

Yes, a woman just wanting to be alone is more threatening. Is this something that men already have or is it something that they don't need? I was trying to kind of disentangle it. Is this something that's particular to mothers?

I mean, I'm sure the world is full of introverts and extroverts, and there are certainly men who crave solitude and thrive in solitude as much as women do. But I think when we're talking about motherhood, and particularly motherhood when you have young children, there just is- I mean, there's data around this, right? There is for better or for worse still, The Second Shift, that 1989 book, the idea that women still do much more, the ratio of the housework and the caregiving even. It just is statistically true from research that women have less autonomous time to themselves. So I don't think it's that men don't want it, it's that they're getting more of it. In that essay I talk about the idea being that solitude is not a preferable state to togetherness or companionship. It's not that I long to flee my family forevermore. It's that it's part and parcel of the whole, and that it serves as a really healthy counterbalance to the togetherness. And sort of what I was saying before about what drives me to write nonfiction, this kind of calling or desire to pause from time to time and to take stock of the things that have happened and are happening, and to make sense of them and to reflect on them. And if you don't have solitude, if you don't have pauses, then you don't have the time to sort of absorb and metabolize all of the things that are going on in your life.

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