Nicole Graev Lipson is an essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Her debut book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, is a braided memoir that weaves personal experience with literary reflections to explore motherhood, womanhood, and the transformative power of reading.
Lipson and I chatted via email about the complexities of female friendship, the fictions that shape women’s lives, and the freedom that comes with aging.
Before diving into this particular book, I am always curious what writers inspired your writing throughout your career. Are there any writers who especially stand out?
Too many to name! Let me see if I can break these into categories. For their gorgeous writing on the sentence level: Joanne Beard and Annie Dillard. For the brilliant things they do with the essay form: George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick, and Jerald Walker. For the ways they make thinking sexy: Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. For their blending of embodied experience with cultural observation: Claire Dederer and Leslie Jamison. For their brilliant considerations of womanhood and motherhood: Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Rachel Cusk, bell hooks, Jacqueline Rose. The list goes on.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters blends deeply personal memoir with reflections on literary works. What inspired you to take this braided narrative approach, and how did it help you explore the themes of motherhood and womanhood?
I’m not sure I decided to take this approach in any sort of conscious, deliberate way. Books have always been central to my life and who I am, and the boundary between my reading life and my “actual” life can feel really thin. Reading is part of living—a big part of it, for me—and so when I’m exploring a personal moment from my life, it feels really natural to weave in a novel or poem or play I’ve read that can help me understand that experience in some way.
Sometimes, too—like in my essay “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me”—the act of reading is the deeply personal experience I’m investigating. I wanted to see if I could dramatize just how sensual and stirring and provoking and life-changing reading can be. I’d say Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is as much about the transformational power of reading as it is about womanhood.
This book is extremely personal. How do you approach writing something so private and what needs to be shared with the reader?
It’s funny, because while it’s true on one level that a lot of what I write is pretty personal, the writing process makes it feel less so. It’s almost as if, once I start translating private experience into words, and then shaping and honing and revising those words, they take on a life of their own—a life as art?
As a memoirist, everything that I write is and must be true, but I, Nicole, am not actually there on the page, standing naked in all my truth. I forget this all the time when I am reading memoir, even though I’ve written one! I often feel, after I’ve finished a memoir, as if know the writer through and through, in the same way I know my best friend. But what we read in any memoir isn’t the whole truth: it’s a carefully curated facsimile of the truth. For every detail included, there are infinite ones left out.
How did writing this book help you confront or deconstruct the roles women are often expected to play in society?
My book’s epigraph is a quotation from the philosopher Simone Weil, who claimed that “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” While writing this book, I wanted to explore the many ways that fiction can infiltrate women’s lives, making us strangers to ourselves. But I also wanted to consider possible pathways for us out of the reductive templates of womanhood we’re handed. One of these pathways is literature, because in many ways, literature allows more room for complexity, messiness, and inner contradiction than our actual lives do. In my own life, I’ve drawn strength again and again from richly complicated female characters—whether this is Shakespeare’s Rosalind or Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier or the speakers in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems. I think there’s a way in which, when we “become” these characters imaginatively as women, we enter a sort of practice ground for embracing our own complexity.
The theme of female friendship plays a crucial role in your narrative. How has your own experience with close female friendships informed your exploration of this subject in the book, and why do you think these relationships are so essential in women’s lives?
The chapter of the book about my closest female friend, Sara, was the most enjoyable chapter to write, and I think there’s a good reason for this! I explore many intimate relationships in the book—my relationship with my husband, with my children, with my mother. But to my mind, what sets my friendship with Sara—and other women–apart is how free it is from obligation. I love my husband, but there will always be certain transactional, quid pro quo quality to our relationship, simply because this is baked into the institution of marriage. I love my children, but this love will always bear the weight of parental duty. Close female friendship, at its best, is a refuge from all of this. It may be the one place in the world where a woman can simply be, as she is, with no pressure to conform to a certain ideal.
In your book, you discuss the freedom that comes with aging, particularly as a woman. What do you hope readers take away from your reflections on growing older, and how does it tie into the broader themes of self-acceptance and change?
I’m not at all immune to our culture’s insistence that youthful beauty is the key to happiness for women of any age. Arriving at middle age did stir in me all kinds of longings to halt time physically. I found myself clinging with white knuckles to anything that might help me preserve a more youthful appearance: expensive body sculpting classes, fancy serums and face creams.
As time went on, though, I began to understand that it wasn’t a pert ass or smooth skin I was craving—not really. What I wanted, more deeply, was the feeling that life isn’t over for me yet—that desire and exhilaration and surprise and undiscovered potential are still waiting for me on the horizon. Looking young doesn’t give us these things–living does. The wise women teachers and older female mentors I’ve most admired most in my life understand this: they live and grow wiser and pursue new goals and don’t waste time wandering the aisles of Sephora searching for the fountain of youth, as the patriarchy—and beauty companies—would like them to. My main goal for the second half of my life is to become one of these women.
You explore a range of difficult, sometimes taboo subjects in your book, from your mother’s affair to your own complex relationship with motherhood. What do you hope readers understand about the power of embracing and confronting these challenging topics in our own lives?
Part of my purpose in writing this book—my main purpose, actually—was to question the invisible boundaries imposed on women. Shame is one of the tools our culture uses to pressure us into compliance. It teaches us to be ashamed of aspects of ourselves that are totally natural, and to think of the very things that make us human as unspeakable. On the surface, sharing that I’ve found myself attracted to a man who isn’t my husband, or that I’ve longed at times to escape from my children, may seem deeply private–but are these things really that personal? What straight, married woman and mother hasn’t felt both of these things at some point? I wonder if some of the feelings I share in my book feel private, in part, because we’ve been taught not to mention them, and so there’s tremendous silence around them in our culture.
I truly believe that when a woman suppresses her own complexity, she suppresses her humanity. And so in this book, I tried to lay bare my own messy–and sometimes unbecoming—complexity on every page. Did this feel dangerous and frightening and exposing at times? Absolutely, it did. But every revelation I include in the book is there to serve this larger purpose, to move the needle in some small way on what we consider acceptable for women to feel and think.
What do you hope to explore in the future with your writing?
At the moment, I am working on an essay about family estrangement for an exciting anthology, Broken Free, which will be published by Catapult next year. I’m perpetually surprised and fascinated by the naunces of human relationships, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop writing about the ways culture and history infiltrates the most intimate corners of our lives. Fortunately, our world gives me lots of material in this respect.