The Assay Interview Project: Nicole Graev Lipson
August 15, 2025

Nicole Graev Lipson's writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays 2024. A graduate of Emerson College’s Creative Writing MFA program, she lives outside of Boston with her family.
About Mothers and Other Fictional Characters:  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, 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. 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.
Joanna Eleftheriou: Congratulations, Nicole, on this meticulously crafted, imaginative, and enchanting collection. While reading the essays in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, I just kept asking myself, what makes me love these so much? I think it’s the way you use language—always employing a startling simile and turn of phrase and doing what the essay does best, which is to illuminate contradictions. I delighted with equal measure in the thrills of recognition when I related to your experience, but also in glimpses into what’s foreign to me—the heterosexual, the maternal. I concluded that perhaps the key to what made me love these essays might lie within your title—the maternal and the monstrous might be polar opposites at first glance, but the essays reveal that the binary, the opposite, is actually kin.

The first essay of the book opens with a striking portrait of the quintessential kinship figure, the mother. The portrait is of your own mother, and later essays explore in great depth your own experience of seeking to become a mother, as well as the joys and struggles of daily life as a woman with children. When did you realize this would be a collection about mothers?

Nicole Graev Lipson: For several years after I became a mother, I actually felt painfully severed from my creative and writerly self. In the book I describe this block as the feeling of a vein being cauterized. I simply could not find my way back to the page.

I wish I could say this was just a matter of exhaustion and adapting to being a caregiver. But it wasn’t motherhood, exactly, that had pulled me from my creative self. It was my sort of frantic, white-knuckled attempt to be a “perfect mother”—in all the ways women are led to believe that such a thing exists. It felt to me as if the solitude and mental roaming and ambition that writing requires was in direct opposition to this ideal, and so to choose my writing was to risk damaging my children in some vague way that only time would reveal.

During those first few years of motherhood, something else happened though. I began to awaken to how bound my personal experience of motherhood was to the larger patriarchal system of rules and expectations for mothers—what Adrienne Rich called the “institution of motherhood.” I became acutely attuned to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways our culture uses the mythology of the “maternal” to suppress women’s power. I felt a dramatic shift inside of me, and I knew I was ready not only to return to writing, but to use writing to figure out what the hell had just happened to me. I wanted to explore the cultural forces that push not just mothers, but women generally—as we move from girlhood to young adulthood to middle age and beyond—to engage in an annihilation of self. 

On my desk along with yours is the book Maternity, Monstrosity and Heroic Immortality from Homer to Shakespeare. To me, these books seem to be in a curious dialogue. Do you think that we are in a moment of reckoning for the mythic figure of the mother? 

Absolutely, yes. It’s certainly not the first time in history that women writers and thinkers have grappled with the mythology of the maternal or confronted the realities and performances of motherhood through a critical lens. I’ve already mentioned Adrienne Rich, who took on this topic in the 1970s alongside other second-wave feminist thinkers like Sara Ruddick, bell hooks, and Nancy Friday. And some wonderful memoirs have come out in the past couple decades by authors who use their experience as mothers as a way into grappling with the maternal ideal—I’m thinking of A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, which came out in 2001, or Kim Brooks’ Small Animals from 2011. But I do think we’ve been seeing a more widespread flourishing recently of critiques of the mythic mother, which I suspect is related to the pandemic and all of the ways it made starkly clear the outsized burden mothers shoulder and the little social support we have. These inequities can absolutely be traced to the gender essentialist framing of caregiving as a sacred female calling as opposed to a form of labor. A devoted, and often joyous labor—but labor nonetheless.

The pandemic was a dark time, but it did give way to a blossoming of books challenging stifling ideas about motherhood: Chelsea Conaboy’s Mother Brain, Angela Garbes’ Essential Labor, Amanda Montei’s Touched Out, Elissa Strauss’s When You Care, Jennie Case’s We Are Animals, Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced, to name a few. This wave of literature gives me hope, and it’s an honor to think that my memoir is in conversation with these books.

One of the collection’s greatest triumphs is the way you demand a rethinking of how our culture frames women, especially mothers. Do you have any literary mothers?

One thread I explore in my book is the lasting influence of the wise woman mentors I’ve been fortunate to have in my life, many of whom pursued literary-minded careers. My high school English teacher Mrs. Rinden awakened my love of poetry and made me believe that perhaps I could be a writer one day. My college writing professor Lydia Fakundiny, who taught a course called The Art of the Essay, sparked my love of the form, and I can still feel her presence in everything I write. She was the first person who made me feel that my thinking could be of consequence. And she helped me understand how writing could be an instrument of that thinking, and not simply a record of what one already thinks.

Then, of course, there are the women writers whose work nurtured my own becoming as a writer, and who have “mothered” me in this sense. Many show up in my book. Kate Chopin deepened my thinking about women’s desire and offered me a model for how to write about it.  Virginia Woolf made me more alert to the “pattern hid behind the cotton wool” of everyday life, showing me how the most seemingly mundane moments can be saturated with meaning and drama. She emboldened me to believe I had a story worthy of telling, even though my life, on the surface, is unremarkable.

Alice Munro has become a fraught figure of late, and for good reason, but I’ve long admired her ability to illuminate the complexity of mothers’ experiences and the richness of women’s inner lives. Her stories were life-changing for me because they showed me how the “domestic” experiences of mothers, so often dismissed as small or inconsequential in the literary realm, can contain all the drama and import of the classic hero’s journey. You do not need to leave home for 20 years to fight a war in Troy and then sail across an ocean slaying monsters in order to reveal something essential about the human condition.

As I mentioned in the opening, it struck me how well you explained what usually goes unexplained, the unmarked experience. Just as few US writers discuss how it feels to be white, few explain what it’s like to be straight. I found that your descriptions gave rare insight for those of us without membership in the majority club: your descriptions of motherhood have helped me understand my friends better. How did you approach depictions of both normativity and difference?

What a wonderful question—I’ve never been asked this before. I wonder if part of the reason my book felt this way to you is because a goal of mine, while writing it, was to illuminate the cracks and inconsistencies and limitations—and often, the outright harm—of what’s considered “normal.” I think when one is part of any majority identity it can be easy to lose sight of the qualities that define that identity, and to think of it as a sort of baseline or default. The expectations and rules of being white, for instance, or of being heterosexual, so saturate popular culture and our daily encounters that they can cease to become noticeable, and that is a huge problem, because these rules are often horribly twisted and damaging.

Writing these essays, I often tried to step outside whatever experience I was describing and view it from the vantage point of an outsider, as a way of de-normalizing it for myself and others. For instance, it might seem normal for women in our culture to spend hours on their physical appearance or undergo plastic surgery to attain beauty, but in my essay “The New Pretty” I describe in pretty gruesome and violent terms the lengths to which my own mother went to conform to beauty standards. I turn the “normal” into something jarring, which, if you take a step back, surgically slicing off a portion of one’s nose truly is. I love writing that makes the strange feel familiar, but my own goal with this book was to make the familiar feel strange, and to use that strangeness as a mode of questioning norms.

There’s no way, of course, for an author to ensure that everyone feels included in her writing, but I did long to create points of access for readers whose identity and circumstances and experiences don’t align with mine. And I was careful, as I wrote, not to depict my personal experience as monolithic and universal, though I did hope I might in some way penetrate barriers of difference and get at what it means to be human.

Your essays are populated by literary figures both mythical and real—Emily Dickinson, Gregor Samsa, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Galatea, Enoch, Ganymede, Plutarch, Pygmalion, Huckleberry Finn. What challenges arise when bringing together such a motley crew of characters and texts? How do you ensure your audience feels engaged even if they don’t recognize a particular reference?

It is a motley crew! One of the most fun parts of writing this book was seeing what authors and characters showed up to the dinner party. There are some literary figures—like Chopin, Woolf, Munro, and Rich—whose work has been such an influence on me that their presence in the book makes perfect sense. Shakespeare and Toni Morrison didn’t exactly surprise me. But I never could have predicted that, say, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint would creep in, or Robert Bly’s peculiar treatise on manhood, Iron John. These appearances revealed to me the extent to which all our reading experiences shape us, even those that don’t feel monumental in real time.

In terms of reader engagement, I knew I wanted these explorations to feel like an added layer or dimension to whatever theme I was pursuing, rather than a detour. As a reader of braided essays, I sometimes get impatient to get back to the matter at hand—the juicy human drama—rather than linger too long in whatever the adjacent threads are. And so, when weaving in references from literature, I tried to include only the background information that was truly essential for readers to get their footing.

Also, I really wanted to capture how reading is an embodied experience, and not simply an intellectual one. We don’t read just with our eyes and minds, but with our whole selves, and every literary encounter we have is colored by the circumstances of our life at the time: our age, our relationships, our mental health, our geography. Often, allusions to literature can feel as if they’ve been dropped in from some detached and sterile place—when really, reading can be as thrilling a lived experience as any. I wanted to conjure that thrill on the page by putting some of my reading experiences in scene. So, for instance, I don’t just reference Kate Chopin’s story “The Storm,” but conjure myself reading it late at night, exhausted on my couch, while the dishwasher hums. I don’t just reference Thoreau’s Walden, but recall what it felt like to first encounter that book as a seventeen-year-old.

We know that narrative essays rarely turn on a crisis action or climactic moment the way short stories do, so what produces tension and momentum in plot’s stead? How do you ratchet up the tension in your essays?

This varies from essay to essay, but overall, I think that essays do need to contain some suspense if they’re going to keep readers engaged and invested. And to create this suspense, there needs to be something at stake, some unanswered question that the scenes and reflections hinge on. My essays aren’t mystery stories, but they function a little like mysteries, in that they circle around a central question whose answer isn’t yet clear. In “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” the mystery is whether or not I will succumb to my temptation to commit an act of adultery. In “Hag of the Deep,” the mystery is whether I’ll be able to protect my son from harmful cultural messages about masculinity. In “Very Nice Blastocysts,” the mystery is what I’ll end up doing with my three frozen embryos. A lot more happens in these essays, and they all contain detours, but the engine that drives them onward is that unsolved mystery.

What’s your relation to other genres—you mention taking poetry classes while you were writing these essays. How does writing poems influence your essaying?

Poetry was my first love as a writer, starting in high school. And in college, until I stepped into Lydia Fakundiny’s essay class, I gravitated toward poetry workshops and literature classes and secretly dreamed of becoming a poet. I’ve always been in love with language and fascinated by the subtle shades of meaning words can have—the way that words like, say, “cheerful” or “happy” or “content,” while technically synonyms, can feel vastly different in their meaning and create starkly different moods on the page.

We use the word “diction” to describe word choice, and it’s such an unsexy-sounding word, but the words we choose—in writing and life—are everything! I’m grateful for the years I spent writing poetry because doing so helped me understand the power of the words we select. I weigh each word when writing an essay, holding it up to the light to consider from all angles before committing to it. Every single word of my book has been put on trial.

What a fitting way to close this interview—with every word on trial. Every word required a little essaying, a little testing and trying, before it settles into its position. Thank you so much for engaging so thoughtfully with these questions, giving us all a glimpse of the thinking and process behind your stunning creative work.

Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation, Joanna. It’s been a pleasure.
Joanna Eleftheriou is author of the essay collection This Way Back and has published essays, poems, and translations in Bellingham Review, Arts and Letters, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. Joanna serves as a contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, associate professor of English at Christopher Newport University, and a core faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece.

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