Motherhood as an Expression of Conscience: An Interview with Nicole Graev Lipson
As a woman and parent, I have often thought about how we are socialized to think and behave and wondered what it takes to reject this programming. For Nicole Graev Lipson, this feels not only possible, but necessary.
Lipson’s new memoir Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Books, March 4, 2025), which received a Kirkus Star, reveals a narrator who questions all of the assumptions—including her own—of what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a wife. Actively grappling with inconsistencies and contradictions, she deeply examines the roles she has played over the course of her life and how much of her participation has been conditioned versus chosen. Her new understandings are vulnerable and empathetic, conjuring a sensation of fetters loosening, of mental, physical, and emotional space opening up—of allowing ourselves to be human as opposed to an imagined ideal.
Although this is certainly a book for women who seek to maintain a sense of possibility through every stage of life, it is also required reading for anyone who wonders if it’s possible to tread a new path that meanders away from the expected and obligated. I came away from each essay buoyed by the belief that we can indeed think and feel our way into a new place—one that is expansive enough to hold all of our stories, as elusive, complicated, and beautiful as they are.
Nicole Graev Lipson is an author and award-winning essayist who was born and raised in New York City and now lives in the Boston area with her family. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays 2024. The author and I spoke on a video call prior to the release of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.
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AG: Some of these essays were originally published separately in literary journals. What spurred the compilation?
NGL: I found it very hard to access the creative parts of myself when my children were infants, but when my youngest turned two, I connected to my creative self more strongly than I ever had before. It’s interesting because we often think of caregiving and creativity as being in conflict, but I felt very called at that point to center my writing—to write about things that had to do with motherhood. I wrote a few essays and started to see that even though on the surface the essays were about quite different things—one was about my frozen embryos, another was about my attraction to a younger man in the midstream of my long-term, otherwise happy marriage—they were circling around a central theme of the blurry boundary between truth and fiction when one is a woman. Of how the stories that we inherit can become entangled with our own until we don’t know which parts of us are true anymore. Once I recognized this unifying thread between the pieces, I started to envision a project where these would be woven together to create a larger story. Landing on the title drove the direction of the rest of the collection.
AG: One theme of your book was that of balance—balancing one’s obligations to self versus to other (kids, partner, outside work), one’s opinions versus others’ opinions, and one’s desires versus others’ expectations. This applies not only to the narrator, but also to the children she’s trying to raise. There’s a constant negotiation happening. How did you recognize you were being influenced by implicit programming? How did you begin to recognize that you were marching to the beat of music that you weren’t playing yourself?
NGL: I went to an all girls school growing up, and I think this had a lot to do with making womanhood an important lens through which I feel, think about, and critique the world. That feminist lens has been with me for a while. But because of how immersed we are in the myth of the ideal mother—it’s the kind of soup that we live in and the air that we breathe—it took me longer to put that feminist lens on motherhood. For the first few years of motherhood, I experienced so many of my “failures” as personal ones as opposed to failures of our society, culture, and systems, which hold us to impossible standards as mothers. Later, in my MFA program, I wrote an essay exploring motherhood, and it contained a lot of guilt about ways that I felt I had failed my children. My workshop teacher, an older and extremely wise and enlightened man, pointed out that these were not personal failures. He suggested I read Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, which I did. The deep, thoughtful, wise, and poetic interrogation of motherhood as an institution that Rich lays out was a revelation. She contrasts motherhood as a cultural institution versus motherhood as a private, personal, powerful, meaningful act. That book shifted the way that I thought about my own motherhood and the way I judged other mothers in my life, including my own mother. It also opened to the floodgates to other books that critique motherhood in feminist ways, and I began writing in dialogue with them. My book would not exist without Rich’s book.
AG: My favorite line in “Thinkers Who Mother” was “…in happiness they [mothers] are thinking, and in anger, and in boredom.” Your essay unpacks some of the embarrassment I have felt at times when I admit to being a parent in the art world, because society in general doesn’t recognize the complexity of this role. I myself never comprehended the range of skills necessary to do the job well before I took it on. I think there’s still an idea that because it’s ubiquitous, it must be easy. Well, it’s always easy to do a bad job at something, but what does good motherhood look like for you?
NGL: My definition has definitely changed over the years. My essay “Tikkun Olam Ted” is about separating ourselves from our children: I try to recognize that my role is not to mold or push them in directions that are pleasing to me. It is to accompany them and to offer wisdom, insights, and suggestions where I can. And that’s hard, because we love our children so much. We want what’s best for them. Discerning what is truly best for them from what we think is best for them requires constant vigilance. So, I think one thing that makes a good parent is knowing when to step back. And I think another is the ability to be vulnerable and honest when we don’t know something, when we are struggling, when we’ve made a mistake. Showing that we’re human allows our children to become more comfortable in their own humanness. I think that’s it: just trying to do our best, stumbling, falling, and then picking ourselves back up and trying again.
AG: In “Hag of the Deep,” you write that there’s goodness at the core of every child, as opposed to chaos or meanness that you need to rein in. At the same time, there are things we don’t want to let pass. In the case of this essay, it was a group of boys flinging themselves at each other. How do you figure out where the line is between guidance and control? When do you step in?
NGL: I have become more comfortable lately with trusting my gut, more comfortable in my authority to be able to say something is not in my children’s best interest. I have just drawn a line and said no. At the same time, there’s so much pushing us towards throwing up our hands and saying, it is what it is. For example, I used to monitor what my kids watched on tv, and now I have no idea what they’re watching. I just hold my breath and jump in and hope everything is going to be okay.
AG: When my kids were very young, it often seemed that girls had it easier than boys when it came to identity. Girls are now encouraged to choose math and science and LEGOs. They can reject or embrace pink. They can be athletes and prom queens at the same time. Whereas in many ways, boys are still boxed in. When my son was a preschooler, I remember having more than one conversation at the dinner table about how there’s no such thing as girl colors and boy colors. I never felt compelled to assert that with my daughter. Is it possible to be neutral with our approach? Or is an overcorrection necessary to regain balance?
NGL: I do think the man box can be tighter than the woman box. My approach is to call things out when I see it. Like the LEGO ads: I might say to my son, oh, that’s interesting—why do only the LEGO sets that are geared towards girls have little cute puppies and kittens. You like cute puppies and kittens. Maybe they should be in the boys kit. Or maybe there should be no LEGO sets geared toward boys or girls at all. I’ve tried to come at it from a place of observation and curiosity as opposed to a top down approach of saying here’s what you should think, here’s why this is wrong. I found that works better for me. But I don’t always succeed at this. For example, my son has known the word “misogyny” since he was five. Sometimes I get so indignant that I can’t help but fume and lecture. But I do think coming at things from that place of wondering and curiosity is helpful. Then the child can connect the dots and come to their own conclusion. I think that’s very empowering for them.
AG: In “The New Pretty,” you examine beauty and gender expectations. You make decisions to take your time away from meeting them, to take your time back for yourself. I wonder what needs to be in place before we can reject these expectations? What conditions, prerequisites, and perhaps privileges?
NGL: I often think about that with my kids, who are pretty slovenly when they go to school. They wear pajamas. On the one hand I think this is great. And on the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it reeks of intense privilege that they can just roll out of bed and not care what other people think. I think changing the expectations placed on humans—women especially—to appear a certain way is not going to change overnight. It’s so entrenched and so big. But I do think these expectations can slowly change. I wrote about my grandmother in that piece. She took an hour to put on makeup every morning, and I think it’s probably much rarer for a woman to do that now. There are of course things we have to do because we live in a society with other human beings, certain norms and protocols we have to respect. We shouldn’t show up to a work meeting in our pajamas with bedhead, because that violates the rules of respect that we have all created around interacting with other humans and moving through the world. But there’s a line between basic respect and dedicating a lot of time and energy to physical appearance. At some point, I realized that I was spending 15-20 minutes a day simply blow drying my hair, and that those were minutes that I was not doing something else and couldn’t get back. So I made changes: not wearing makeup on a daily basis, spending less time shopping for beauty products, and making my peace with this. I still enjoy putting on makeup for a special occasion. I will probably have makeup on for my book launch. But on a day-to-day basis, I’ve tried to make a concerted effort to gather those moments back that I might have once given to beauty and presentation.
AG: I think you hit on it. It’s whether you’re doing it for yourself or you’re doing it for someone else. The question is who you’re doing it for, and why.
NGL: And who is not doing it. Men, generally, are not doing it. So they have all that time for themselves and other pursuits.
AG: Speaking of time: in “A Place, or a State of Affairs,” you wrote “only after I’ve had children do I realize that motherhood and selfhood might be entirely incompatible callings.” When I first got married, I assumed my partner and I would have equality in caregiving because we had the same title, same number of degrees, and theoretically, the same salary potential (we met at work). That assumption began to change when I was pregnant with my first child, and fourteen years later, it’s pretty much in the trash—in part because our respective outside obligations have changed but also because it’s clear that we have different ways of approaching parenthood. I like to anticipate and plan in advance, like lining up a pediatric dentist before my kids even had teeth, whereas my partner would wait until there were some visible evidence that our child needed a pediatric dentist. Which means I always get to things first. All these years later, I am still fond of saying that no one warned me about what it would be like. If you were to give your children advice about parenthood—about the tradeoffs or considerations—what would it be?
NGL: It’s funny. I was just saying to a friend the other day that I don’t know if my children will ever become parents. I probably make it look so frenetic and grueling. I wonder if I’m the worst advertisement for motherhood ever. But I also think this is a reflection on how how much the world has changed. My childhood was not frenetic and highly scheduled. I did ballet, but that was a couple afternoons after school. Otherwise, I came home from school and did my homework and watched some TV. My mom spent a lot of time on the phone with her friends after she got home from work. Now, in order for me to talk on the phone with a friend, we have to schedule it. We have to text, how is 9:48 pm tonight? So I am vocal at times in front of my children about how much is on my plate. I’m not trying to hide those messy seams. Sometimes I will say to them, “I’m not feeling great. I’m really tired. I’m not at my best right now. So I’m sorry, sweetie, but I’m not going be able to help you with whatever it is you’re asking for.” They’re seeing my depletion firsthand. And I don’t know how that will impact them in the future, whether they’ll say my mom showed me that parenting is hard, grueling work, and I don’t want that for myself. It’s too bad because I don’t think it has to be this hard.
AG: It’s also a function of where and when we’re living.
NGL: Yes. I grew up in New York City. Once I got to fifth grade, I had my bus pass and was taking public transportation around the city. Now, we give our children less freedom, and as a result we have less freedom.
AG: And the expectations of parents these days is that we are supposed to be on top of everything.
NGL: A lot of those messages and pressure come from our immediate social circles. It’s not that my friends and acquaintances are expecting anything of me, Nicole, in particular, but if 98% of the kids in my children’s class are doing club sports outside of school, then that suddenly seems very normal. Even though in my heart, it does not feel normal to pick up a kid from school on a daily basis, scramble to drive them to a practice 40 minutes away, order food for dinner on my phone because I’m not home to make anything, and barely see my other children. I know in my heart this doesn’t feel right. But it does take a resolve and willingness to follow your own drumbeat to go against the grain of what everyone is doing.
AG: To decide where to draw the line that you’re not going past.
NGL: In my essay “Thinkers Who Mother,” I quote the philosopher Sara Ruddick when I say that in my most authentic moments as a mother, I understand fully how the work of mothering can become “a rewarding, disciplined expression of conscience.” That’s what I’m getting at here. That in my conscience, I know that I shouldn’t let my 14-year-old have social media, for example. And trying to parent based on that feeling, that knowledge, and my conscience—that’s the thinking at work. That’s what makes parenting not just a labor of love, but a discipline.
AG: That is another theme I got from your book. It’s about a narrator who’s trusting her internal compass more and more as time goes on.
NGL: Yes, absolutely. And that compass can be hard to locate sometimes, because we can’t help but be part of the culture that we grow up in. It’s not as if it’s the culture against me. It’s the culture in me. We’ve absorbed these messages, and teasing out truth from fiction is harder than it might seem.
About the Author
Ann Guy is a writer and recovering engineer who was born in the Philippines, grew up among the cornfields and cow patties of Western Michigan, and now lives in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction in 2020 and her MA in English with Creative Writing in Fiction in 2018 from San Francisco State University, where she received a Distinguished Graduate Award from both programs. Her writing and interviews have appeared in Craft Literary, River Teeth (Beautiful Things), Sweet Lit, Entropy, MUTHA, Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, Motherwell, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a historical and speculative fiction novel about migration, loss, and kinship. Find her at www.ann-guy.com.
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