Nicole Graev Lipson’s debut Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a collection of twelve tightly crafted essays that blend personal narrative with reflections on history and literature. The book is, of course, an exploration of motherhood, but Lipson is also broadly concerned with the roles women often play—or are expected to play. In “The New Pretty,” for example, she riffs on the concept of beauty, which is not a “physical ideal” but rather “the promise of power, for which we cede the power we already have. “The Friendship Plot” examines the ways in which female friendships have been portrayed from antiquity to now. As with many of the essays in this collection, the author challenges the stories we’ve been told. Lipson is bored, for example, by the tired notion that “girls and women are wired for rivalry.”

Lipson calls her book a “bibliomemoir” and this comes through in the ways in which she connects her experience– and the experiences of her family–to literary texts. “As They Like It,” originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review and later included in the 2024 volume of Best American Essays, examines gender identity and generational change through the lens of Shakespeare’s Rosalind. The opening essay, “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” explores sexual temptation through the lens of Chopin’s “The Storm” and the resulting scholarly debate: Was Chopin condoning or condemning the female protagonist’s affair? Is she a hero or a villain? Or neither, as Lipson suggests, since life is more complex than the reductive narratives that are often fed to us. Above all, Lipson continually returns to this central question: How, in the face of idealized versions of motherhood in which intellect is pitted against the maternal, can a woman “carve out a motherhood that’s not a projection of others’ fantasies, but an authentic expression of her values?” 

I spoke to Nicole Graev Lipson about resisting the “good mother” archetype and the connection between caregiving and creativity.

Victoria Livingstone: Let’s talk about the title of this collection. I interpret the reference to “fictional characters” as an invitation to challenge the reductive stories we have been told about the roles women play, whether as thinkers, friends, lovers, or mothers. Can you say more about the title?

Nicole Graev Lipson: I love how you call this an invitation, because that’s exactly how I wanted the reading experience to feel—like a door held open for readers to walk through to consider alongside me the narrow templates of womanhood our culture hands us. I wanted to challenge these reductive stories, yes, but even more, I wanted to explore how easy it is for us as women to become complicit in their telling, erasing our own complexity as we step into fictional versions of who we are. My way into this territory was to write as intimately and honestly as I possibly could about the ways I’ve embodied these templates against my better judgment–as a girl, a young adult, a mother of three, and a woman now standing in the shallows of middle age. 

My book’s epigraph contains a quotation from Simon Weil’s notebook: “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”  Each chapter of my memoir conjures a particular attempt to tease out truth from the fiction in my life, and to locate the strength to live this truth more fully. In one, my sudden, aching attraction to a younger man upends my sense of what it means to be a happily married woman. In another, I grapple with what it means, as a mother and creator of life, to destroy my frozen embryos left over from a round of IVF. In another I lay bare how I’ve fictionalized myself in the most literal way possible: by altering my very flesh to conform to beauty standards.  

As a reader, English teacher, and book critic, I knew that pursuing these questions would mean revisiting the treasured literature that has shaped my understanding of the world and my place in it—works by Doris Lessing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and others. These forays into literature give the book’s title a secondary meaning as well—because it is so often in the realm of the imaginative and fictional, ironically, that I find truth. 

VL: The opening paragraph describes a photo of your mother before she was a mother. In the photo, she is young and glamorous. For me, the image ties into one of the themes of your book: the sort of splitting of selves that can accompany the experience of motherhood. Could you say more about that? 

NL: Finding that photo in my mother’s drawer when I was a girl had a profound impact on me, because the woman in it—sprawled on a loveseat in a velour catsuit, smoking a cigarette and squeezing my father’s cheeks—seemed so wildly different from the mother I knew, who was very composed and subdued and most certainly didn’t smoke. It illuminated for me a whole new way that my mother hadn’t always been A Mother, and that she contained layers and facets far beyond my imagining.

During my teen years, the extent of the schism between my mother’s outward life and inner life came to a head in explosive ways. All this made me acutely attuned to how much pretending the role of mother can demand, and the potential harmful consequences of this pretending. My husband and I were married for six years before we had children. I kept delaying, not because I didn’t want kids—I very much did—but because of my looming sense that once I became a mother, I’d be subsumed into a sort of generic, stock “Mother” identity and have to forfeit all my particularity. I’d internalized that the realm of motherhood was a separate place entirely from the realm of intellect and ideas, and the prospect of leaving behind my “thinking” self, in particular, filled me with dread.  

After our first child was born, I did find myself lured, for a time, into enacting what I thought “good motherhood” looked like, frantically pureeing vegetables and trying to wear my daughter in one of those earth-mama slings I could never figure out how to wear right. I felt so powerless to resist the archetype that I threw myself into it instead. What ultimately freed me was coming to understand just how faulty—and misogynistic—the assumed divide between mothering and thinking is. Mothering is thinking, through and through. There’s perhaps no experience that has challenged me to observe, theorize, analyze, and revise my assumptions of what it means to be human as caring for children has. And I would say that my best parenting happens not when I’m pretending, but when I’m being my most genuine, idiosyncratic self. I think children can sniff out dishonesty, and they respond—like all of us—to the true.

VL: What role does literature play for you in reconciling the various parts of ourselves? 

NL: Literature for me has been a life-saving reminder that we all contain contradictions and are more complex than meets the eye. I think it’s so easy to go through our days imagining that other people are more whole—and in a way, more simple–than they are. We assume that the mother we always see on the playground smiling hugely as she pushes her child on the swing always feels joyously unconflicted about her role, and we can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with us. Literature frees us from this illusion, because it allows us to peer directly into the consciousness of others, where things are always layered and shadowed. It’s a sort of practice ground for embracing our own complexity.

VL: You offer no easy answers. In your essay on IVF, for instance, you are unable to reconcile your political ideology with your reluctance to destroy embryos stored in a lab. I see writing as a transformative process. What did writing these essays reveal to you? Did your views on any subject shift as a result of writing this book?

NL: The writer Philip Lopate said that “The essay offers the chance to wrestle with one’s own intellectual confusion,” and for me this feels very true, and so different from what’s commonly expected in public discourse, which is airtight argument and opinion. I love essay-writing because it allows for ambivalence and bewilderment. More than ever in our polarized climate, we are expected to pick a side and know precisely where we stand. Personally, I have a clear opinion on very few things that involve any level of complication.

I’d say that “As They Like It” is a good example of how an essay can be a place for reckoning with confusion. Observing the ways my oldest child began, in early adolescence, to migrate from girlhood to boyhood was deeply confusing. On the one hand, I love my child and wanted to support them no matter where this journey was headed. On the other hand, I had questions, and the changes were happening too fast for me to wrap my head around. I was hungry for the stories of other parents who struggled to get their footing as I did, but nearly all the first–person writing I found by the parents of trans and gender non-conforming kids was persuasive in nature, op-eds in the service of a politized stance. I wanted to see if I could come at this topic from a purely human stance, and to reckon honestly on the page with my own learned biases and blind spots. 

Every single essay in this book was born from the very human desire to resolve a dilemma. I wanted to figure out once and for all what to do about the ethical problem of my frozen embryos, what to do about the harmful ideas about manhood my son is absorbing, what to do about my fear of becoming irrelevant as my body ages. I’m not sure if any of my views changed as a result of writing this book. But what the writing did do was help me claim more fully those truths I know deep in my bones but have been taught to question. It emboldened me to honor my own authority, and to trust the wisdom I’ve gathered in my decades on earth. 

VL: This book is, as you put it, a bibliomemoir. You mention canonical authors such as Adrienne Rich and Kate Chopin as well as contemporary writers. What about the recent surge of books on motherhood? I’m thinking of books published in the last five years– which books have you found particularly influential or surprising?

NL: These books are like candy to me, honestly. I think there’s a bit of an oversimplification in the publishing industry categorization of the “mother book”—an assumption that these books are all more or less alike and will appeal to a very specific sort of mother-reader. But motherhood doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with every other facet of the human condition. I love seeing the endlessly varied ways motherhood can lead writers to a fuller, revised understanding of their other experiences and preoccupations. In her memoir Lessons for Survival, raising two Black sons heightens Emily Raboteau’s awareness of the threat of climate changes, particularly for marginalized communities. Yael Goldstein-Love’s speculative novel The Possibilities is about postpartum motherhood, but it’s also a wild adventure into quantum mechanics and the multiverse. Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, too, isn’t about motherhood, per se, but about all the characters women shape-shift their way through as we move through life. Motherhood is sometimes the topic, but more often, it’s a lens through which I encounter the world.

I think there’s been a real awakening in the past few years to how the “failures” we feel as mothers are often, in truth, societal failings. The book that first opened my eyes to this, Adrienne Rich’s 1976 Of Woman Born, isn’t new. But there are more recent books I’ve loved that deepen Rich’s arguments and bring them into the 21^st century. Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced, for instance, opened my eyes to the ways our digital world has intensified expectations around motherhood, and Amanda Montei’s Touched Out traced a line for me I hadn’t quite seen before between rape culture and the surrendering of bodily autonomy “good” motherhood demands. I’m so happy that these books are being written, and that these dialogues are happening.

VL:  I agree! There are so many recent books–including yours– challenging reductive narratives of motherhood. However, at the same time, terms like “mom brain” and “mom guilt” persist– and, as you point out, terms associated with the term “mom” or “mommy” are trivializing and often insulting. Many of us then internalize the biases associated with those terms. A lot of recent literature is pushing against that– what about other art forms? And how else can we call attention to the problems with that kind of terminology?

NL: I was an art history minor in college and have always responded powerfully to visual art, though I have no particular talent in this area! But I love going to museums and galleries and have discovered in recent years some artists who are challenging the cliched tropes of motherhood in beautiful ways. If there’s a bias in the literary world against motherhood-centric work, the sense I get from my artist friends is that this is even worse in the art world, where there’s still this lingering myth that to be a real artist, one must devote herself obsessively and single mindedly to her work. Motherhood, in this narrative, is a dealbreaker, not inspiration. 

My newsletter, “Thinkers Who Mother,” explores the symbiosis between caregiving and creativity, and in each issue, I highlight a particular writer or artist. I recently featured the sculptor Venetia Dale, who creates fiber sculptures out of other people’s unfinished embroidery projects and casts the stuff of her daily life—like leftover food from her children’s meals—in pewter. Her pieces don’t try to hide the disruptions of caregiving but instead make unfinishedness part of their shape and beauty. I also loved profiling the photographer Kristen Joy Emack, who has been photographing her daughter and nieces together for over a decade in a series called, “Cousins,” which beautifully makes visible how caregiving can hone our attention.    

For the love of god, let’s not call these women “mom artists”! They are artists, and one of the experiences that informs their art is motherhood. 

VL: Your mother is an important character in this collection. You write about how much emphasis our culture places on our relationship with our mothers in shaping who we become. You write that “We come to understand that our mother signifies, and that our relationship with her is a story crucial to pursue.” Could you say more about this?

NL: I think there’s a fine and precarious line between a deep regard for the role mothers play in nourishing life, and the scapegoating of mothers when things go wrong. This goes all the way back to Eve, right? The original sinning mother, whose mistake we are all still paying for. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that “We look back through our mothers if we are women,” acknowledging the ways our mothers shape and influence us. But in the warping context of patriarchy, the primacy of mothers is often used against us. We become a convenient target of blame for things that aren’t truly in our control. Sometimes, this blame might of course be warranted—there are some truly horrific mothers out there—but I do think we’re trained by our culture to be acutely attuned to our mothers’ every misstep, and to interpret these as injuries to us. 

I absolutely went through a period in younger adulthood of falling into this trap. I conjure a memory, in the book, of sitting in a therapist’s office in my early twenties, searching for something concrete that would explain the sudden, overwhelming depression I was experiencing, and feeling relief when this therapist coaxed me into talking about my mother. The problem wasn’t me, it was her! 

Becoming a mother disabused me of this illusion. Nothing has ignited my compassion for my mother like discovering just how much raising children demands. I also now understand the  psychic burden of internalizing, as so many of us do, that whatever goes wrong in our children’s life must originate in some fault in us. This is a terrible cross to have to bear. If there was one gift I could give to all the mothers I know, it would be freedom from this excruciating belief.