Motherhood fuels Nicole Lipson’s work

“Mothers and Other Fictional Characters” (2025 Chronicle Books) by Nicole Graev Lipson is an essay collection that explores the nuance of everyday living and elevates what is often thought of as the mundane into ideas worthy of rigorous thought and consideration: mothering, family bonds, friendships. Through the lens of English literature, these essays tackle parental infidelity, a mother’s relationship to her child’s exploration of gender, the joys of female friendship, the complex feelings that can come with IVF, and the challenges of growing older. All these essays are written with a palpable love for their subjects, no matter how flawed, and a transparency of thinking that is increasingly hard to find.

Nicole Graev Lipson’s writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, has been selected for “The Best American Essays” anthology and has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Emerson College.

She spoke to me for Jewish Rhode Island; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“Mothers and Other Fictional Characters” is such an incredible title. How did you come up with it?

It's a bit of a play on words – “fictional characters” because on the one hand, I'm trying to illuminate some of the fiction in our real lives as women. But I am also trying to illuminate how fiction, in its willingness to embrace complexity, to look under the surface of things, can feel so real.

Motherhood has been a much-explored (or more-explored) topic in the past few years. What drew you to this topic?

While I have always written for a long time, it was my secondary occupation. I was teaching English, working in book publishing, and I freelanced, but always on the side. It was really becoming a mother that gave me this sudden longing and desire and resolve to center writing in my life.

I feel like motherhood was a magnifying glass on everything that I cared about and made me feel everything more powerfully and strengthened my urge to communicate about it and do my part to try to make the world a better place. My writing is not a protest sign, it's not a piece of legislation, but in all my writing, I am trying to do my part, to move the needle ever so slightly on some of the injustices I see in the world and some of the inequities. And it is motherhood fueling that work.

“The artistry and intellectual rigor of mothering are hardly recognized at all.” What do thinkers who mother need to do (or what resources do they need to have) to be part of the conversation?

I am really advocating for small shifts to begin with, in the way that we talk about motherhood, in the way that we talk about parenting and in the ways that we acknowledge what our fellow caregivers are doing and really recognizing and valuing the work that it takes. We receive so many unspoken messages that really devalue and denigrate caregiving in our culture, which is maddening when you consider just how important it is.

I think it is important to find those opportunities to really spotlight the intellectual rigor of caregiving along with the feeling that goes into caregiving. Because, as I point out in that essay, it's both, right? It’s not that intellect is more important than feeling, but I do think that there is this, you know, glorification of maternal instinct in our culture. All mothers know that it’s anything but instinct; it's a lot of hypothesizing, mistake making, refining our assumptions, testing things out, reflection. It is an intellectual process, and we grow and get better at it the more we do it.

I loved your essay “The Friendship Plot” about your friendship with Sara. Tell me about your decision to include it and what you think it adds to the collection.

In many ways, this collection is about love in all its forms. In every essay I am trying to act from the deepest place of love and put together this sort of collage of the roles we take on in life. I think that female friendship is so formative for girls, and that was a really important piece of the puzzle to get in how our female friendships shape us.

I also wanted to get that in there because, as I argue in the essay, for so many heterosexual women in committed relationships with men, our female friendships and relationships remain in some ways our most intimate relationships, and female friendship for me, and for a lot of women I know, has been the place where I air everything, where I can be in some ways my truest self. There's just so much less pressure in a friendship. And I think along with that easing of pressure, there's more freedom to just be.

What drew you to the essay form? What does it allow that other forms do not?

Every single one of my essays is propelled by love and born from confusion. I sit down to write usually because there's something that is bewildering me, perplexing me, confusing me, and I am trying to write my way through it. What I love about the essay form is that it is a place that allows confusion.

I think that there's so much non-fiction writing, the hot take, the 800-word essay, the opinion pages, where we are expected more and more to have a very clear and firm opinion and to come down on a particular side.

There are some issues currently where there's so much pressure to come down on a particular side that people can be accused of betrayal of a particular orthodoxy if they are not fully black and white in their thinking, which I think is really dangerous. I think it's very dangerous to forfeit our nuanced, complicated, contradictory thinking for the sake of activism, however well meaning.

It's such a humble claim that the essay makes. It's like, I'm not trying to convert you. I'm just trying to figure out this thing, and I'm inviting you to try along with me.

Your piece on IVF and the blastocysts was something I had been searching for –philosophical and ethical thinking on this topic are hard to find. What influenced your thinking on this essay?

In that essay, I really wanted to explore how I could, on the one hand, be passionately pro-choice and believe with every fiber of my being in a woman's right to choose what to do with her body, and at the same time, I had all of these kind of like thorny emotional feelings about my unused, frozen embryos which I absolutely do not think of as life. I wish I could just dispose of them like biopsy tissue, but they came to be representative of some sort of potential. I really wanted to be able to capture the both-and-ness of that particular experience in my life. And I really wanted to capture that state of being of two minds.

Tell me about how Judaism influences your motherhood.

As I write about in “Tikkun Olam Ted,” there is this idea, sort of fundamental to Judaism, that it's not our job to fix the world, but it is our job to do our part. And that can mean many things, right? It can mean writing to your elected officials. It can mean picking up trash on the streets. It can mean donating money to the causes that you believe in.

Judaism reminds me that it’s okay to not be perfect but to keep trying and returning to the principles and the values that are at our core. It reminds me of Yom Kippur. I mean, it's scheduled on the calendar that every year we are going to fail. It’s not like, “Oh, are we going to have to do Yom Kippur this year?” It's coming. We will have to do it.

I do think of caregiving, of mothering, as a type of repair work. We have these humans in our care, and the choices that we make are choices about what changes we want to see in the world. I do think raising children is such a fundamentally optimistic task. You cannot raise children without hope for a better world in some way and without thinking on some level every single day about the lessons that you're imparting and the ways that you are trying alongside with your children. I think that motherhood calls you to task on that.

As part of The Cardigan Connection, Nicole Graev Lipson will be speaking on Tuesday, March 11, at 6:30 p.m. at Alchemy, 171 Chestnut St., Providence. To register, go to https://www.robinkall.com/events-interviews/the-cardigan-connection-1

She will be in conversation with Rabbi Sarah Mack on Wednesday, March 12, at 9 a.m. at Temple Beth-El for Coffee and Conversation. For more information, https://www.temple-beth-el.org/event/nicole-graev-lipson-book-event.html

 SARAH GREENLEAF (sgreenleaf@jewishallianceri.org) is the digital marketing specialist for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and writes for Jewish Rhode Island.