Zibby is joined by Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson to discuss her searingly intelligent, revealing, and nourishing memoir-in-essays, MOTHERS AND OTHER FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. She explores the ways in which women are often reduced to societal archetypes and how they, at times, internalize and perform these roles. She also shares insights on beauty standards, motherhood, marriage, authenticity, and self-acceptance, weaving together personal experience with cultural critique.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Nicole. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about mothers and other fictional characters, a memoir, and essays. So good. Congratulations. 

Nicole: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled.

Zibby: Even rereading the book, it's your sentences, the way you describe everything, how much I feel like I have lived in your shoes, seen what you have seen, and how well you captured moments in time, particularly like growing up when we did, and our mothers, and that whole world. You just nailed it, not to mention today.

So I just am obsessed, it's so good. Thank you. I feel like I can retire now. Thank you. It's so nice to hear. You have so many themes. Well, let me let you talk. Talk about where did the inspiration for this come from? What do you, how would you describe it? Tell me the back story and the, and the regular story.

Nicole: Sure. So, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is about the strange and relentless desire that the world has to reduce women to ready made templates and archetypes. And it's also about the ways that women can we as women can become complicit in this process and how easy it is to find ourselves sort of performing fictional versions of who we are and I find this way and I find my way into this territory by I always write I always start from the personal and so I find my way into this territory by writing as honestly and truthfully as I possibly can about my own experience embodying these templates as a girl, a young adult, a mother of three, and a woman now standing in the shallows of middle age, gazing out at the rest of her life. And so they, all of these essays, sort of tease out my own attempts to tease out truth from fiction in my own life. One of the epigraphs of the book is, uh, a quote from the philosopher, uh, Simone Weil's notebook, and she writes that imagination and fiction make up three quarters of our real life.

And that was sort of one of my inspirations as I wrote the book. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, what you capture the way you intimately write about marriage and even the way you describe when you go for like a date night with your husband or away for the weekend and How many things you have to line up and how when you finally get to the hotel?

It's like slamming It's like an overpacked closet door. You said it better. But like just the image, right? That like you're, you're just like holding it and you know it's going to like collapse as soon as you open it again. And like, how can you really relax in that case? Like, but you don't say it that way.

You write it in like this very poetic almost way where you're forced to take it in kind of slowly. Imagine yourself. I don't know. I was, I'm so into it. And you write, and you write about your own relationship with your body and makeup and eating disorders. Tell me a little bit about that because I found it beautiful the way you wrote about your experience in college.

Nicole: Yeah. So I think sort of building on this idea that I just mentioned that I'm exploring in the book, the ways that we as women sort of can step into these fictional versions of who we are, I've given a lot of thought over the course of my life to the way to beauty standards and the ways that we can end up fictionalizing ourselves in like the most literal and physical way possible, right, which is to actually transform our bodies.

And fictionalize them in ways, whether that's through like, in my own, my own experience and I write about the eating disorder that I had. That I struggled with in college and a little beyond so really controlling my body and kind of as a way to step into that fiction of the ideal like young woman, especially growing up in the nineties when the ideal young woman looked like Kate Moss.

And so I write about that. And I write about, again, my personal experience as a window into the culture, our culture at large. And one of the things that interests me about beauty standards in particular is I feel like there's so many realms of life where there's almost this schism in us as women where we can know something intellectually and we can know intellectually, like, of course, it's a waste of time to like be wandering the aisles of Sephora for half an hour searching for like that serum that is magically somehow going to make me young again, right?

Or like, of course, we know that it's, you know, absurd that we should hold ourselves to these standards, these physical standards of thinness. So we can know that intellectually, but we cannot help but be part of the culture in which we live. And we absorb those messages into ourselves in a bodily way. And so I think there always is this divide in us.

And that's really what I was. Trying to capture in that specific essay that you're talking about right now, how can we know something intellectually as women and yet at the same time, try to embody these ideals? 

Zibby: Well, in the story, you talk about going to get your hair done to cover up the gray, which is now like, sadly, a, I don't know, every three months situation that I'm like, I keep putting off and I'm like, Oh no, I couldn't possibly need to do this again. I just did this. And the kids are like, Oh, you only have gray hair. And I'm like, okay, I guess it's time that you, that you came home and your daughter and you, you asked your daughter, like how you looked and she said, well, I like it when you look like you.

Right? 

Nicole: Yes. 

Zibby: And that, and that kind of freed you it felt like to, to be who you are and maybe not wear makeup all the time. And you were so funny. You're like, I'm not sure anybody's even noticed, but I have decided not to wear makeup. 

Nicole: Right. Exactly. Yeah. I think like that scene, right where I go, it's It's when I color my hair for the first time when the grays had, I think I write that it's like they could no longer pass as highlights, right?

Like it crossed that tipping point. And I came home and my daughter, I could tell, like, she didn't come right out and say like, I hate your hair, but she you know, she recognized on some level, like this doesn't really look like my, my mom as I know her anymore and what's the, what's the point. Right. And I think that's so true.

I mean, you know, if, if I think about myself personally, if I'm trying to put myself together, right. Or look nice. And I guess this is a wonderful thing as I, as I'm saying it, I'm recognizing what a wonderful thing this is, but my husband doesn't really care. Right. You know, like, my husband, like, I, if I'm getting dressed and I'm like, how does this dress look, he like, barely glances up and I think, you know, the truth is, like, he doesn't really care where, whether I'm wearing sweatpants with my hair, like, a mess and in a top knot or whether I'm wearing a beautiful dress and it, you know, I think it, it, it goes to show, or it makes me question, like, for whom do we, Go through these performances, right?

If are the people we love most in the world, our partners, you know, our Children, our friends love us, right? Just the way we are. You know, what is it that is causing us to strive for impossible standards of physical appearance? Right. Isn't it that we all just, like, 

Zibby: get dressed for each other? It's for other women.

It's mostly for other women, isn't 

Nicole: it, at this point? For other women, and I also think some internalized standard, like, we are holding ourselves to, like, it's almost for ourselves, which is so peculiar, um, and really interesting. So I'm really, I'm really interested in, in things like that in the book. 

Zibby: You wrote really beautifully about motherhood.

Can I read this one from, let me, I don't even know what essay it's from, but I loved it. Let's see. It's from the essay called, Which Lineage? Can I read this about your daughter, Leigh? 

Nicole: I would love that. Okay. 

Zibby: He said, How easy it was to imagine, in the first weeks of Leigh's life, that I would never fail her.

Every part of her beingthe soft hill of her belly, her blinking eyes, her parted lips with their tiny slips of breathinsisted that perfection was possible, and that it could be sustained and nurtured if only I remained up to the task. Not every woman, perhaps, was up to this task, but my God, I would be.

New to motherhood, I had the conviction of a convert, the enthusiasm of the freshly arrived. The hardest thing for me about motherhood, 11 years and 2 more children later, has been the gap between this desire and reality. The truth is, I have failed my children again and again. I've failed them with my laziness, my preoccupation, and my insensitivity.

I've failed them with my habit of murmuring, Oh, and that's funny, while they tell me stories I cannot bring myself to focus on. I've failed them by rushing them past anthills, past robin's nests, past the imprint of copper leaves on the rain washed sidewalk, for no purpose other than getting going. I've failed them by comparing them to others, because look how polite Miles is and how Julia hustles like wildfire to get open for the pass, and why can't you say please like that, hustle like that, too?

I failed them every time. I forced their squirming torsos into car seats, wrangled their flailing bodies up the stairs, gripped their arms more tightly than I should. I failed them by snapping, shouting, and worst of all, out of all proportion to the cause, rising out of some hideous, stifled place inside, screaming at them at times of the rage so unbridled it terrifies even me.

Can I redeem myself if I describe my love for my children, heavy and silver dark as mercury, so dense at times that it traps my breath in my chest? Let me tell you about the songs I've sung them, the stories I've told them, the picture books I've read so many times I have them memorized. Let me describe our traditions, the lighting of Shabbat candles on Fridays and the double layer cookie cake on birthdays and the sharing of our day's highs and lows before we turn out the lights.

Let me conjure the months I nourish them with nothing but milk from my breast. Let me speak of the sacrifices I've made, the desires I've tamped down, the career I've delayed, the dreams I've tucked away in service of their desires, their passion, their dreams. Ah, but look, already I find myself slipping from tenderness toward something more toothed and suspect, sabotaging my own defense.

So you see, it is not so easy to separate the angel from the witch, the goddess from the monster. Our goodness has made monsters of us all. 

Nicole: Oh, so good. So good. It's really amazing to hear it through your voice. Yeah. Thank you for, for reading that. 

Zibby: I mean. Who cannot relate to that? That there, that we all try to do our best.

And yet there are times we fail our ideals of ourselves, fail the moms we want to be, fail the people we want to be, even if it has nothing to do with kids, right? That despite our best intentions, other behaviors come out and we can regret them and we can do lots of good. And yet they're still there. And what do we do with that information?

How do we move forward? 

Nicole: Yeah, what do we do with that information? It really is amazing. I can, you know, even as you're reading that I can put myself back in that mind frame of having, you know, a newborn baby. And just, I actually remember so clearly thinking, how can anyone, this was my first child, how could anyone ever yell at their baby, right?

And I didn't. And, you know, on some level that belief is still in me, right, when I, when I, when I'm in my best moments, you know, and I'm lying with one of my children in bed and like a tender moment and, you know, that other part of me is not there, you know, the part that can snap or the part that can be totally distracted when they're telling me something or, and I think it's so true that, that we have to it.

Just keep moving forward, doing our best to put our best foot forward in one of the essays in the book, Tikkun Olam Ted, I talk about the sort of the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, which is repairing the world. And that whole idea comes from this belief that the world is imperfect and that um, that kind of standard or ideal of perfection is always there, and it is human's work to try to constantly, constantly prepare.

And so the best I can do is When I have aired, which we all do because we're human is to admit that to my children to my spouse, to whoever I've let down, you know, according to my own standards of letting someone down. And I think that's something I've personally become more comfortable with as I've aged and gotten older.

I don't know about you, but you know, I feel like I used to have like so much pride and now I, I realize how good it feels to recognize and acknowledge and speak the wrongs I've done. 

Zibby: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's much easier to say I'm sorry. Like, right away. Like, I was wrong. I got it. I get it. You don't even have to keep saying that.

I messed up. Moving on. I messed up. I'm sorry. 

Nicole: Yeah. And for mothers especially, because I think we carry so much, we hold ourselves to such high expectations, which is, you know. A result of the very high and impossible expectations that were held to our culture. And I think it's so, you know, it's a struggle that I, that I outline in my book.

It's, it's not easy, right. To, to, to kind of. Learn the self, the self forgiveness that lets us out of that guilt. It's a constant struggle, but it's, it's so wonderful when you slowly allow yourself to let go a little bit. 

Zibby: And you show us through this one outing to your poetry class, like what it's like to be in it.

And then what it's like when you just pull out of the rainstorm for a second. And remember who you are because that's really what it felt like there you were like on your way and then there and then you even end up in this flirtation because you're really flirting with the fact that like you could actually still be who you are and what would that life even be 

Nicole: I'm so glad that you saw that and said that, um, cause that's exactly what I was trying to get at in that piece.

Yeah. I think, I think especially when we have younger kids, um, the essay you're talking about, my kids were still pretty young. Um, I think like four, six and nine or something like this. And it's, it's almost as if, you know, we are in some ways. Trapped in this very particular routine, you know, this very particular set schema to our days.

I definitely felt that way. And then to have an escape from it, to have something out of the norm open up in our world can be, you know, not just freeing for that moment in our day, but I felt going to this poetry class, which was So out of the norm for me at that stage of my life when caregiving was so urgent, you know, felt this kind of release back into other parts of myself, you know, other sensuous parts of myself, other intellectual parts of myself that obviously hadn't gone away when I became a mother.

They just sort of were sublimated a little bit or pushed aside or not, not at the center of things. 

Zibby: Yeah. Wow. Well, describe how it, how you wrote this book. Was it like one essay at a time? Did you have it out like, tell me about the process of it and when it became a book. And I know you have won a push, a push cart recently, which was so exciting.

Um, so just like, when did everything happen and how? 

Nicole: So book, I guess when I started writing the book, I wasn't yet aware that I was writing a book. I was writing. Um, when my kids were younger, individual essays that I sort of intended to be standalone essays. And I had written maybe three or four of them when I started to recognize that even if on the surface they were about quite different things, you know, like maybe one was about trying to figure out what to do with my frozen embryos leftover from a round of IVF.

Right. Or another one was about my friend, my dear friend, Sarah and the closeness of our relationship. I began to realize that all of them did circle around this theme of the blurry boundary between truth and fiction when one is a woman. And it was then that I started to think of this as a possibly a book project, a project with.

like a larger scope. And at that point, I started then thinking, you know, okay, well, you know, if this, what would the arc of this memoir and essays be? And then began writing pieces that I thought would fill in that arc. But I also, I just want to say that I've written for as long as I can remember, like, it's always been my passion and loved it and, you know, my favorite subject in school is English and all of this, so the same experience that so many writers have.

But you know, like when I graduated from college, there was no one like, like, McKinsey wasn't recruiting essayists, you know? There's no clear path. And I was so jealous of my friends who were like, I know I want to go to law school. Or, you know, I'm being recruited by McKinsey and getting paid a lot as a 22 year old.

And so for a number of years, I did like writing adjacent things like I worked in book publishing and I was a high school English teacher for a number of years and I was always sort of circling around the writing and I was, I did continue to write and freelance on the side, but it was never my central thing until ironically, because I think there is this It's understandably this belief that becoming a mother, you know, pulls you away from your passions.

But for me, it was sort of the opposite that once I became a mother, once I got past the sort of infancy, like, you know, the in it postpartum phase, I was sort of overcome by this fierce determination and resolve to center writing in my life. in a way that I never had before. And so I don't know. Sometimes, sometimes I think of motherhood as like the fire in my forging process.

Like it is the thing that made me center writing and it is the thing that made this book happen. 

Zibby: I love that. Well, it's really beautiful. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm really excited for you. And it's like not too literary, but beautiful. Like it is literary, but it's not. overly, like, so it's not off putting.

I don't know. I feel like it just hit the sweet spot. And yeah, I just, I got a lot out of it. So thank you so much. 

Nicole: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much. 

Zibby: Thank you. 

Nicole: For having me on. 

Zibby: My pleasure. Okay. All right. Thanks, Nicole. 

Nicole: Okay. Bye bye.