The work of Nicole Grave Lipson has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for the Best American Essays Anthology. She’s the author of the terrific, just-out memoir called Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, published by Chronicle Books. Listen in and read along as we discuss writing essays to push through uncertainty, and a whole lot more.

 

 

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Nicole: Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here, Marion.

Marion: Well, it’s a pleasure for me. I love essays. I love memoir. And boy, do you just hit it out of the park in both. So let’s dig in.

Whenever possible when speaking to an author, I like to palpate back to something that helps unfurl or explain her work. And so I went back and read a 2021 piece you wrote for Brevity, in which you discuss the essay through the deeply wonderful vehicle of a mentor and teacher, Lydia. You credit her with showing you what an essay could be, quote, “The journey of the mind pushing on paper through uncertainty.” Perfect.

You go on to write that through her you learned that meaning had an architecture. “A sentence, depending on how it was built, could crack the heart open,” you write, “like a cathedral door, or leave it numb as a concrete cell.” And so I had to stop and really think about that, about the architecture that we are given with the essay and meaning having an architecture.

And you wrote another essay and then another and another under her tutelage. And you said you were in the middle of a “living paragraph,” one that you could write your way out of. And I just don’t think I’ve ever read a better description of what the essay can do, the process of writing one, and the potential for the writer for discovery. But that was written in 2021. So update me, if you would, on what you know now, having written in so many areas of inquiry via the essay, what you might add about the power of the personal essay.

 Nicole: Oh, well, I’m so honored that you went back and read that piece that was about my college professor, Lydia Fackundiny, who was a mentor and a guiding light to me and has meant so much in my life. And who really, yeah, helped me discover the essay form, which is absolutely the most comfortable genre for me, and probably the only one that I can that I can really do.

But the essay, for me, all of what you read there holds true. The essay for me has always been a place where I feel that I can grapple with confusion. There’s so many places in our life, and especially nowadays, I think more and more we are pushed to take a side in our culture to come down really strongly on one side or the other of a particular issue. And I don’t know about you, but I have very few incredibly clear, definitive opinions on anything that is complex.

I often find myself being of two minds on issues. And the essay for me has been a place to grapple with bewilderment, that feeling of being of two minds, that feeling of trying to work through something that is confusing me so that I can arrive at a deeper understanding of it. And never exactly, I don’t feel in an essay that I ever really come to a final moment where I think I’ve written my way through it and tried to contemplate a problem and arrived at a place where I feel like, Eureka!

Now I have it all settled, right? Like the thing that was confusing me has been resolved. It only gets me maybe slightly closer to clarity, or at least a little more comfortable resting in confusion.

Marion: Oh, I love that. “A little more comfortable resting in confusion.”

I get that. I say to the people that I work with, the writers I work with all the time, that the essay is the greatest place to start. It’s like, I think of the essay, especially this book, this beautiful book that you’ve written is a series of essays and they can be really compared to the human spine. But one of the essays is a vertebrae and we pull it out and we kind of look at it. We kind of bounce that little muffin of a bone in our hands and say, this is part of this spine.

The whole book works beautifully in tandem, one muffin of a bone with the other. But individually too, you’re right, they don’t conclude. They don’t say, and therefore; they’re not the Shakespeare sonnet, you know, at the end that says, case you missed it, this is what the truth is. It’s this consideration, isn’t it? And it’s a, it’s like a worry bead. It’s got this beautiful form to it.

You utilize it wonderfully in this book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.

And in your first essay in this book, you write that you wrote poetry devotedly until your mid-twenties and then had to move into a genre that paid. So you moved to articles and that you are back with poetry stating it’s quote, “the very impracticality of poetry” that has drawn you back in and that you wanted to remember what it’s like to pursue something for no good reason. So this just begs a question. So what did poetry bring to you as a young writer and thinker? And then we’re going to get into the writing something for no good reason in a minute.

Nicole: Sure. I love words. I love words. I love thinking about words. I love thinking about the slight differences between words. I love thinking about how the word “happy” might, on the surface, mean the same thing as “content” or the same thing as “cheerful,” but how these words have just these slight gradations of meaning, these different shades of meaning. And I think poetry in its smaller scope than an essay, I enjoyed in writing poetry, really thinking about the work that every single word was doing and how just shifting one word a little bit could change the whole thing.

It’s like a needlepoint, right?

Marion: Yes.

Nicole: Like everything kind of is woven together and stitched together in such a way. And it’s sort of a self-contained entity. I think for me and how I ultimately work best as a writer and feel most comfortable, I do need a little bit of the larger space of the essay to kind of expand or stretch out my limbs and, you know, allow myself to go down a few different paths and then tack back. But I do feel as a writer grateful for the time that I spent in poetry and taking poetry workshops in college and publishing some poetry after because I think it did attune me again to the gradations of words and really appreciating diction. I know that doesn’t sound very sexy or interesting, but to me it is. Diction and the gradations of word meanings are really fascinating to me.

Marion: I think it is fascinating. I think you need to be fascinated to write. I do. I always think of Emily Dickinson who used to cut words out of magazines and put them next to each other to see how they looked. And I think about the accuracy with which she hones in on both the big and the small. And it’s word by word. There’s just no debating it. I think poetry is the single greatest foundational work for a writer. But how about this idea of writing something for no good reason? And why does that have such appeal? What does that do for us when we just start to, you know, go and operate without a net for sometimes with our work?

Nicole: Yeah, well, writing over the years really did begin to shift for me as I write about in the book.

In my 20s, I was freelance writing for a while and it really became my livelihood. And so, you know, there’s something that happens in the writing when it becomes your source of income, both in the sorts of things that you can write about and your attitude about it, and your orientation to it. And so I really let the poetry go by the wayside for a while.

And after I had children, I have three children, at some point, I felt like my life was so full of “have to do’s.” There’s so many caregiving responsibilities, so many urgent things needing my attention on a daily basis, big and small. And poetry became, for a time, a space where I thought it’s a small corner I have to myself to play around with words and do something that is not going to bring in any income. I really didn’t have any intention of sending these poems out for publication like I was my essays. It was really just something to do because I enjoyed it, which was unfortunately for mothers — and there’s actually data around this, and how much time mothers have for pure leisure: Spoiler alert, it’s very little — there almost felt to me like something of a protest. It’s not a huge transgression to write poetry, but in its small way, it felt a little bit transgressive and a little different from what the rest of my days were spent doing, especially when my kids were a little bit younger.

Marion: Yeah, I think that’s a wonderful reason to write some poetry. Absolutely. All those commitments we have as parents really can be a bit galling and exhausting and to do something for no reason other than to get in with the words is a terrific suggestion.

In this book, you have a series of essays and one of your essays, “Thinkers Who Mother,” you flip on a TED.net 2000s Salon column, Mothers Who Think, which as you say, and I agree, was meant to be cheeky, but always made me a little queasy since I’m never sure that everyone got the joke. So after all, we are burdened, you know, and as you explore in this fine essay, we’re burdened with the kind of hollow platitudes about motherhood that mostly leaves us without much to say.

And you use the example of the standard quote that “motherhood is the hardest job of all,” which may sometimes be intended as a confirmation of the work that goes into it but as you say, you’ve become suspicious of such kinds of praise. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.

When you felt that suspicion, that grit, that prickly moment of inquiry, or whatever it is you felt that became suspicion, did you stop and write it down? Did you carry it home in your head and actually remember it and start to explore the idea? Like, why is this galling me this quote? Because what I’m trying to get to the people listening is some craft advice, because the world throws ideas at us all day and all night, and our job is to catch them, have a look, sort out those with heft, and then follow up.

So how does that process look on you? You get an idea, you get suspicious of someone saying “motherhood is the hardest job of all?” Do you carry a notebook? Do you write it down? Or do you do like what my husband does, who’s also a writer, and just ask me to remember it for him? Yeah, yeah.

Nicole: That’s amazing.

Marion: Amazing is one word for it.

Nicole: I love this question. I love and I also love finding out how other people go about doing the work. So I listened, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Twyla Tharp, the choreographer. Yeah, she wrote a book a couple of years ago, The Creative Habit, which is a great book. And I recommend it for anyone who’s creative in any art form.

She talked in that book about how anytime she is beginning work on a new piece of choreography, even if it’s really early stages, just a nascent idea, she starts a box, like literally a cardboard box that she opens up and just devotes to this project. And then as she goes through her life and moves through her days, anything that connects to the box, to this dance, goes in the box, right? So it could be a newspaper clipping that she, you know, or an article that reminds her of this dance she’s choreographing. It could be something in nature. It could be anything, a quote, anything, anything she encounters, she puts in the box. And then the box, the things in the box become the raw material for the dance. And when I was reading this, it resonated with me.

I don’t have an actual box as a writer, but I have a Microsoft Word document. And the Microsoft Word document is my box. And I feel that usually I have an idea. I know it’s an idea that I want to pursue because I get, it’s sort of like a flutter. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s like something I’m confused about. And then I just feel like this flutter of excitement to pursue it, and dig into it, and learn more about it and look at it from different angles.

And an essay takes me a period of several months to write. And over those months, I find as I’m going through my days that suddenly the world is full of synchronicities. Somehow the world is full of things that pertain to the topic at hand. So just to make this more concrete, you know, I have an essay in the book about women and solitude and how women, and especially mothers, are deprived of solitude, which I explore in great depth. Solitude being something that is not a luxury or something nice to have, but something that all humans deeply need in order to function.

And so the box for that was a Microsoft Word document that just was called “Solitude Essay.” And for three months as I go through my life, things started to connect to it. Or then maybe I’d be reading something and something I was reading would connect with what I was exploring. So I guess I sort of just become almost like a magpie collecting things in the document. And then the work becomes figuring out how to connect these different things. Not all of them get used in the end. The document is an unholy mess. You know, there’ll be a link to a podcast, followed by a quote, followed by a sentence that came into my head in the middle of the night. And I think the work of writing the essay is figuring out how all these things connect and going from one point to the next to the next. And sometimes I think of it a little bit like stars in the sky and constellations. Like all of these points of light in the document. And then the essay, the writing is trying to figure out how to draw the lines between them to make the picture, to make the story.

Marion: That’s so interesting because I was so taken by the essay, “The New Pretty,” and you have this formidable string of cultural references from Kafka to Naomi Wolf to the unforgettably great movie, “Little Miss Sunshine.” And it’s a repeated procedure across several, many of your essays, pulling us in via what you’ve read, seen, experienced in life, your grandmother, your mother, yourself, your children. And now you’ve just answered for me. You accumulate these references. It’s almost as though when you get an idea, you’ve got a magnet in your hand and the metal shavings start to show up. And that’s what the page is. You’re just putting these metal shavings down there, you know, saying this, this, this, this, and this. And that’s so helpful to people. And so generous also that you said that it takes you several months. My students say, “I wrote an essay.” And I always say, “No, you wrote a draft of an essay.” And they just look at me like, “No, no, it’s done.” I say, “Well, okay, let’s talk about it.” And it’s a process, but it starts for you with these references. And I love that.

And I wanted to ask you specifically about that essay, “The New Pretty.” I read it also in Hippocampus in a 2020 edition of the wonderful Hippocampus Magazine. And it’s just a terrific piece. And the writers listening want to know how to build a writing career. So were you testing your material on the public? Did you publish that piece so that you could get a book contract? Did you publish that piece to see if people liked it? What was the process of thinking? Were these quilt squares that you were putting out in the world to see if you could gather them together? What’s the chicken and egg with the essay to book relationship?

Nicole: Yeah, so I guess when I started writing this book, I didn’t know that I was writing a book. The earliest pieces really were intended, as I wrote them, as stand alone essays. And I would finish an essay and then send it out into the world via Submittable, which some people might be familiar with. And I really, all I hoped for them was to find a good home for them where they would find readers. And it was after I’d written maybe three of them that I started to realize that even if on the surface, they were about different things, about expectations of appearance for women and beauty standards, if we’re talking about “The New Pretty,” or another early one was the opening essay of the book, “Kate Chopin, My Mother and Me.” And that one was, on the surface, it was about thinking about an affair that my mother had when I was in high school and my shifting orientation to that transgression over the years, how I interpreted it when I learned about it in college versus how I thought about it as a young married woman myself, versus how I think about it now as a married woman with three children. Or an essay about female friendship about my best friend, Sarah.

So on the surface, these are all about different things, but I started to realize that at their core, at their heart, they were all different variations on the same theme, which was the ways that we as women, that I, as a woman, have felt a dissolving of the boundary between truth and fiction in my life and how easy it can be to absorb the stories that we’ve inherited and step into them and give over the truest parts of ourselves as a woman in the ways that our culture wants us to.

And once I saw these connections, that’s when, again, I had the flutter, but this time it was for a book. Oh, you know, I really wanted then to continue to explore this theme of the stories that estranged us from ourselves as women over the course of a whole book.

Marion: I think a lot of writers think that we have it all figured out. And I think what you’re showing us here is that we walk into a lot of rooms. We walk into a lot of dark rooms. We walk into a place not knowing what we really think. But then if we start to see that some of these things are exploring various aspects of our female selves, for instance, we can build out a book from there, but it’s not having it all figured out. I don’t, I think I’ve ever met a writer who I trusted who, quote, “had it all figured out.”

Instead, it’s inquiry, it’s curiosity. And I think of it as an adventure, a great adventure in consideration. And you have such candor. And in “The Thinkers Who Mother,” you have this remarkably refreshing line in which you state that you had always been writing starting in childhood, writing, writing, writing. And then for 30 years, you say, “I wrote, and then I had a baby and I no longer wrote.” And you go on to write, “What stood between me and writing wasn’t mothering. It was striving to mother perfectly, to become fully and completely that golden idol worthy of adulation.”

Ah, yeah. I remember that in motherhood early on, right? So let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about candor. Is candor, I always wonder what candor is. Is it utterly dependent on vulnerability? Is it just bold faced honesty? Give me your take on candor and how it happens and what it is when we see it.

Nicole: I love this question. No one has ever asked me this question. I feel that I have a lot to say.

Marion: Oh, good.

Nicole: I’m gonna start, for some reason, I’m thinking about my son, my middle child. He’s like constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. That’s not true, actually. He can tell a lie, but he will lie, but he’s unconstitutionally capable of sitting with that lie. He has to come clean, even when he was very little. So, you know, he might come up to me out of the blue and be like, “Mom, you know when I said that I only had two cookies?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’ll say, “Well, I actually had four.” And he does this, I’m pretty sure, because it just feels good to get it off his chest.

It doesn’t feel good when the truth that we know, it collides or is in contrast with what other people think or believe, especially if it’s people who we love and are close to, right?

And so I relate to my son in that way, because for me, writing the truth or writing as close to the truth as I possibly can has that really deeply freeing effect on me. This feeling that I can brush away the pretensions, I can relax from the striving to look a certain way or appear a certain way, and I can just lay out the truth. And there’s something freeing in that, and there’s also something quite empowering about it, which is to say, what’s gonna happen if I state this truth? What’s the worst that’s gonna happen, right?

Marion: Yes.

Nicole: And, you know, in some cases it can be bad, right? I’m not saying everyone should go out and profess their truth all the time. We have to weigh the consequences. But I was really trying to play with that line in this book. And part of what motivated me to continue to pursue this theme for a book-length project was that I felt that I, in many ways, had become throughout my life estranged from myself in stepping into these sort of fictional versions of what a woman should be, whether that’s a sort of the maiden archetype of the young, attractive, desirable sex object or, you know, the mother archetype, any of these things.

The writing became almost like knots on a rope leading me back to myself. Like every sentence I was trying to grasp at the truest truth in order to pull me back to myself. So getting back to this idea of candor, I think that in a book about teasing out truth from fiction in my life as a woman, I had to speak candidly. That was the whole point. The whole point was to brush away all of the trappings and the freight and the weight of what I’d been carrying and to zero in on the truth.

Marion: A wonderful answer. I love the idea of the knotted rope leading back to yourself. And the comparison to your son makes all the sense in the world right now. That freeing feeling of finding at least what’s true to us now in this moment.

And as we wrap this up, I wonder if we can just talk for a moment about the consequences of candor. You touched on it there. I have a sister. Every time I tell a story, my sister will say, “That never happened.” And we’re both right. It happened to me that way. She has no memory of it because it wasn’t important to her or something. But what about when you think about when you land on one of these truths, these knots leading back to yourself, are you contemplating? What are you contemplating? Are you worrying? Are you, you’ve written very candidly about your mother. You’ve written very candidly about your grandmother. So what considerations do we have as we go hand over hand up that knotted rope back to ourselves?

Nicole: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s such a fascinating question for anyone writing true stories, memoirists, essayists. I think one of the reasons it’s such an interesting question is because it has no single answer. It has no good answer. But I’ll share my experience.

Whenever I was writing about real people in my life and people who are nearest and dearest to me — my husband, my children, my mother — I was always very mindful that whatever I was writing was coming from my own perception, my own embodied perception, what I saw with my own eyes, what I felt with my own hands, what I smelled, what I, you know, what I tasted, and not projecting myself into their experience. That’s their story, right? That’s their story to tell. That’s theirs to own.

And it is just the truth of existing on a planet in community with other people that our stories are going to overlap. There’s just no way around that. But what I always, you know, tried to do was treat every subject with the greatest dignity and always with compassion, which doesn’t mean to me sugarcoating. And it doesn’t mean, you know, looking at a subject through rose colored lenses, but to really speak truthfully with compassion.

And something really interesting that happened to me in the process of writing this book is that some of the difficult or complicated things that I wrote about, I always talked to the person who I was writing about, whether it was my husband or my mother about what I was writing. And ultimately everyone has seen what’s in the book because I didn’t feel comfortable publishing it without them seeing it. But to me, the really rich and interesting part of this is what happened when I would have conversations about what I was writing, because I would inevitably it ended up or it led me to voice things that I hadn’t voiced to them, but probably should have at some point. And it opens up conversations that I feel led to almost greater intimacy and openness between us and deepened the relationship in some ways.

I don’t want to paint this all as like, you know, skipping through a field of flowers, holding hands, but my point is that some of it was difficult, but I really don’t think that most people want to be seen as perfect. I think that most people wanna be seen fully with all of their flaws and all of their foibles and all of their idiosyncrasies and all of their quirks and all of their errors and loved deeply anyway. And that’s what I try to do in a lot of my writing. And you can never as a writer make sure that every customer is 100% satisfaction guaranteed, but I do always try to write with compassion. And I also turn the same eye onto myself, which I think is really important for any writer who’s writing true stories is whatever kind of attention you’re giving to your real life subjects to give to yourself as well, like that same scrutiny.

Marion: Oh, it’s beautiful advice. And so welcome, as is this book. I’ve been carrying it in my purse. I’ve been reading it everywhere I go, and I want everyone to go get it and have the experience I just had reading it. Thank you, Nicole. It’s a wonderful book. I wish you all the very best with it.

Nicole: Thank you so much. I so enjoyed this conversation.

Marion:  Me too. And you’re very welcome. The author is Nicole Graev Lipson. See more on her at Nicole Graev Lipson dot com. Her new book is Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, a memoir and essays just out by Chronicle. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit Studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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