Award-winning essayist Nicole Graev Lipson presents an intimate and analytical portrait of motherhood in her debut memoir-in-essays, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Covering topics such as desire and fidelity, beauty standards, inherited gender norms, and female friendship, these 12 deeply honest essays cast aside flattened ideas of motherhood in favor of a more complicated narrative.
Lipson often looks to her own mother, skillfully entwining their stories to recognize the patterns that mothers pass on. She recalls the betrayal she felt as a child when her mother sought cosmetic surgery while recognizing the same emotion on her own child’s face after Lipson dyed her hair to hide grays. When revisiting childhood memories of her mother’s harshness, Lipson finds new empathy by imagining what her own children might one day say in a therapist’s office.
Throughout her personal experience, Lipson weaves insights from literature. Kate Chopin’s erotic story “The Storm” helps Lipson confront the undercurrent of sexual desire within her marriage. Alice Munro’s story “My Mother’s Dream” helps Lipson forge the distinction between a “good mother” and a real mother. And, in her daughter’s exploration with gender fluidity, Lipson seeks guidance from her favorite Shakespeare character, Rosalind from As You Like It.
The memoir also delves into masculinity, questioning how to raise a son in a patriarchal world. Lipson writes of her discomfort in allowing her son to play with plastic military men, despite her efforts to eschew toys that glorify violence. Though she earnestly strives to be a thoughtful parent, she challenges herself to let go of the false notion that children are reflections of her maternal strengths or failures rather than their own independent beings.
With a decisive connection between mother and thinker and equal parts grief and love, this memoir is a bright spot for the smart, multifaceted, and flawed mothers who sometimes make time for one more bedtime story.
Top Image via Chronicle Prism
