As You Write It | Los Angeles Review of Books

THE LAST TIME I was catcalled is as clear in my memory as the sky that day. (The times before it are a blur: What was that he said? Did he compliment my body? Ask for a date? Had he yelled “bitch,” or did it only feel like he did? I’m tempted to say he whistled, but that sounds like something from TV.) I pushed an empty stroller down a broken sidewalk on the last stretch of the mile-and-a-half walk from my front door to my child’s preschool in East Atlanta; the late-afternoon sun dampened my skin. As I shifted my grip on the stroller to one hand and wiped sweat from my lip, I made eye contact with a man walking towards me. He raised an eyebrow. “Hey, Mama,” he said, with a flirtatious smile. My head must have tilted to the side. Was he showing off his powers of incredibly basic deduction, or was “Mama” his preferred pet name for all women? Was he suggesting I was his mother? Had he simply spoken on impulse, aroused by my motherhood in the way that cishet men often seem to find themselves attracted to pregnant women? We passed each other, and as we did, I examined his face for some clue. It had pinked, his smile thinned into a straight line. His gaze followed not my body but the stroller—perhaps, I thought, wondering the same things as I.

In Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays (Chronicle Prism, 2025), the author alternately describes herself as a cubist sculpture, a rule-loving girl, a witch, a hag, a mommy, a monster, a sylph, and a MILF. These variously constructed personas reveal how our perception of ourselves as mothers is often inseparable from how we are perceived. Each essay in the collection examines the archetypes imposed on women (and others) from birth, the “fictions” or senses of characterhoods that then follow us into adulthood and aging. I recently had the privilege of speaking with Lipson—fictional character to fictional character—about both embodying and resisting these narratives, motherhood as a muse unto itself, Shakespearean cross-dressers, and the politics of Mean Girls.

¤

ACREE GRAHAM MACAM: The title of your collection immediately resonated with me—the idea of the mother as an archetype, as a figure of the American imagination, the male imagination, everyone’s imagination. How did you land on it, and when did you start to think of mothers as fictional characters?

NICOLE GRAEV LIPSON: I started this book in the thick of motherhood, when my youngest was three. I was thinking a lot at the time about the fictions that we absorb as women, and the ways that we step into different templates as we move through life: from girlhood into young adulthood, and into motherhood, if we choose to become mothers. (Of course, if we don’t, we’re assigned the lonely cat lady trope. Because we’re only allowed two choices.)

I knew that I wanted a title that put motherhood in this larger context, but I was struggling to find one that felt right. One day, on the phone with my agent, I said, “I’m just going to spew out a bunch of ideas. Half of them are total shit.” So, I started going through them and was finally like, “I don’t know, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.” And she paused and said, “I like this shit you’re spewing.”

That was that. The title then helped crystallize the shape the book would take.

As you demonstrate in your essays about your son and your gender nonconforming child, “mother” isn’t the only fictional character out there. So are “boy,” “girl,” “man,” and “woman.”

Yes. While I’m very concerned in the book about the roles women play and the ways in which we are complicit in our own fictionalization, boys and men are under similar pressures. I can’t speak from their point of view, but I try to address this in the book through the pieces that focus on my son and my concerns for him in a culture that does everything in its power to try to numb boys against their own sensitivity. As a parent, you see who your children are on the most intimate level. And you also see the roles they begin to step into as they move more and more into the world.

I wanted to question and challenge the narratives that we inherit as girls, as boys, as women, as men, all of it. But I was in some ways even more interested in how we ourselves become complicit in weaving these narratives—sometimes unawares, sometimes knowingly. I wanted to tease out that tension between what we might know intellectually and what we actually do. On the one hand, I have this deep longing to raise my son in such a way that he’s able to resist the pressures boys are under to project a certain kind of masculinity. And yet I am married to—and personally attracted to—my husband, who is in many ways what our culture expects a man to be. I was trained, as a girl, to find those qualities attractive, right? So it’s not as black-and-white as to say, “This is what’s right in the world, and I’m going to live according to these principles.” I wanted to interrogate how I have fully, in the most intimate way, absorbed our culture’s messages.

Your honesty and complexity are what give the book a lot of its power. I wonder if part of what allows you to dig so deeply in these essays is the way you bring the world of literature into them—from Shakespeare to Kate Chopin to Maya Angelou.

If you’re a bookworm, like I am, the border between living and reading is porous. What I’m reading colors what I’m seeing and encountering in the world. And then what I’m seeing and encountering in the world informs my reading. In my book, I wanted to dramatize the reading experience, to show on the page the sensuality and juiciness of reading, as well as how what we read can be as momentous and life-changing as what we encounter in the physical world. Because literature gives us a portal into the consciousness of others—and because the consciousness of others is always messy and shadowed and layered—it allows us to see human beings in their complexity, in a way that we might not otherwise. There is this ironic way in which fictional characters can be or feel even more real than actual people.

In fiction writing, we often make our characters complex by allowing them to have contradictory traits. You do that here on the page, foremost with yourself, but then with the other people in this book as well. Are there drafts of these essays that made more simplistic conclusions, or was the complexity always there from the start?

All of my essays start with some kind of confusion. That’s what draws me to the page: I’ll know that I want to write an essay to sort through a particular ambivalence or discomfort. My entryway is always the personal and the embodied—what in my life has led to this confusion? I’ll try to create that through scene. Then, because reading is so important to me, I’ll often return to texts that might speak to my experience.

In my essay “As They Like It,” for example, the confusion was observing and witnessing my oldest child begin to migrate away from a girl identity toward the identity of a boy. In thinking about gender identity, I returned to one of my favorite literary characters, Rosalind, who is one of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines. That text then helped me process and understand things about my oldest child’s journey in new ways. My curiosity also led me to dig into some Shakespeare criticism and Elizabethan history, and I learned that cross-dressing was a trend among certain women in early industrial England. And that then informed the writing. So, it was this iterative, fluid process between research, reading, and experience.

Perhaps that essay isn’t so much about your child’s transformation as it is about your own change in understanding.

I do feel like the process helps me get a little bit closer to understanding—or at least gain comfort with resting in uncertainty.

In Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood (2022), Chelsea Conaboy writes about the myth of the maternal instinct. You reframe this so-called instinct as an intellectual “discipline” that we mothers rigorously practice and learn.

My years as a mother have made me realize how little the thinking and intellectual undertakings of motherhood are seen or appreciated—for a long time, even I didn’t appreciate them, and I was living them. If you videotape a day of a mother with their child, you’ll see her doing everything from making decisions around authority to teaching them right from wrong to answering questions like “Why are owls awake at night?” We’re nutritionists, making bodily choices for them, deciding whether to let them climb up onto the counter and open the cabinet themselves.

These decisions, whether conscious or not, have a rationale, and we are making them as intellectual beings. In the book, I write that “we are thinkers before we are mothers, and it is from our thinking that our mothering is born.” There’s this age-old binary in our culture of intellect versus emotion. Motherhood in particular has been assigned to the realm of emotion. And absolutely—there is emotion involved in mothering. But also brain work—reasoning, making hypotheses, refining our approaches … There is so much thinking involved in parenting as well.

Speaking of intellectual undertakings, you critique movies like 2004’s Mean Girls (the greatest film ever made) in which girls and women compete with and slander one another. I was primed to think motherhood would be like that, but that hasn’t been my experience at all.

The “mommy wars”—the working mom versus the stay-at-home mom—are a media narrative. Not that there are no individual mothers who earnestly have these feelings, but I think that most of what might be described as hostility is really uncertainty. It’s less about an actual war with other mothers and more about our own internal wars. Am I making the right choices? These questions and anxieties are very real. And a lot of them are caused by our culture, which sells us a bill of goods in terms of what motherhood is going to do for us. It’s unfortunate that the way these tensions get played out in media isn’t a critical analysis of the systems that are failing us but a dramatized battle narrative between mothers.

I think of female relationships in your essay “The Friendship Plot,” where you point out how saturated our culture is with the storyline of you grow up, you get married, you have kids, the end.

That storyline is very binary. If you are a heterosexual married woman, then your husband is assumed to be your be-all, end-all. And, well … kind of? In some ways? But my best female friend and I are intimate in ways that my husband and I will never be—and there are ways I’m intimate with my husband that my best friend and I will never be. It’s not either-or, nor should it be.

What about competition among writers?

As a writer, community—and especially community with other writers who are mothers—has been huge for me. Life-changing. There are a few books coming out right around mine that also circle around themes of motherhood, and it would be easy for us to think of each other’s books as competition. But we all reached out to each other, and now we have a spring 2025 book release support group, where we lend each other moral support and share opportunities. It is not zero-sum. That’s not how the world works.

While being a mother obviously makes being a writer hard, are there ways in which the two feed one another?

Absolutely. I could write a dissertation about this.

I would read it.

You would think that becoming a mother would 100 percent derail me. But I had the opposite experience. Once I got past the infant stage, when I didn’t have the internal resources to write, I regained my equilibrium and felt a burning desire to get back to writing and center it in my life in a way that I hadn’t before. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that becoming a mother made me more attuned to mortality—I’d entered this new stage of life where time didn’t seem to be infinite anymore. Second, motherhood became my muse. There was so much about it that I wanted to write about. I found it endlessly interesting in and of itself. But it also intensified the issues I had always cared about, because now the stakes were so much higher. Take, for example, the violences that our culture perpetrates against boys, and the slow ways it turns boys against themselves. It’s not that having children opened my eyes to these injustices; it’s that it magnified them. They were suddenly in front of me all the time.

And yet we have this idea of the writer as someone who removes themself from domestic life. (You write about Henry David Thoreau disappearing into the woods.) Perhaps then “writer” is another fictional character.

In these archetypes that I’m examining, the problem isn’t the archetype in and of itself; the problem is the reductiveness of them. For example, if you are a woman who is beyond her childbearing years and no longer physically attractive in the way that our culture defines attractiveness, it is so easy for people to assume that you are not a sexual being. And what I’m trying to do in all these essays is acknowledge the layers that we contain, and to fight for complexity. For everyone, but for women in particular, there are ways that fiction can limit us. And there are ways that stories can set us free.

¤

Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays (2025). Her writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays anthology, and short-listed for a National Magazine Award. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Originally from New York City, she lives outside of Boston with her family.

LARB Staff Recommendations

• Nicole Graev Lipson interviews Jerald Walker about his new essay collection, “Magically Black.”

  Nicole Graev LipsonSep 16, 2024

• Annie Berke reviews Jenny Slate’s new motherhood meditation, “Lifeform.”

  Annie BerkeJan 23