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"This is—for real—a masterwork, one I will return to over and over." —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives.
What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she's testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she's raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.
As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin's erotic story "The Storm" helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth's most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one's frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare's gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.
Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves—and the ones we're still becoming.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 4, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781797228570
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781797228570
- File size: 2630 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 15, 2025
Intimate essays on contemporary womanhood. Award-winning essayist, journalist, and critic Lipson, a 44-year-old mother of three, makes an impressive book debut with a gathering of 12 deeply thoughtful essays on the transitions, joys, and challenges that have marked her life. Anchored by topics such as motherhood and daughterhood, friendship and marriage, beauty, aging, and gender stereotypes, the essays cohere into a revealing memoir. Often, Lipson finds wisdom--or at least comfort--in fictional depictions of women. "There are books that seem to glide into our lives at a particular time as if by design," she writes, "finishing thoughts just partially formed in our minds." Kate Chopin'sThe Awakening was one, with college freshman Lipson connecting with the sexual stirrings of Chopin's transgressive Edna. As a mother, confused by her oldest daughter's apparently fluid gender identity, Lipson found enlightenment in Shakespeare's cross-dressing Rosalind fromAs You Like It and Virginia Woolf'sOrlando. She finds solace in Alice Munro's depiction of motherhood as a "heroic journey," in which mothers are thinking beings. Lipson is candid about the tensions and worries generated by mothering: She feels unsettled, for example, about letting her son play with guns, part of a larger concern about the cultural messages he's learning about manhood. A loving wife in a happy marriage, still, she acknowledges a gnawing desire for solitude. Sometimes, she wonders "if marriage, with its contractual origins, can ever fully transcend the transactional. In a marriage, it can feel as if something is always owed, because it's entirely impossible, despite the gauzy hopes we pin on matrimony, for two people to fulfill each other's every need." With empathy and grace, Lipson unravels the tangle of "illusory standards" that weigh on any marriage and any woman's sense of self. Deftly crafted essays likely to resonate with grateful readers.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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