The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #71: Nancy Reddy
"It’s my hope that the book can provide comfort and companionship to new parents struggling, as I did, under the weight of our impossible and contradictory mythologies of motherhood..."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 71st installment, featuring , author most recently of The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to be a Good Mom. -Sari Botton
Nancy Reddy is the author of The Good Mother Myth, forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press in January 2025. Her previous books include the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which she co-edited with Emily Pérez. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful. You can find her on Instagram at nancy.o.reddy.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 42, and I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I spent high school writing moody Anne Sexton impersonations, then majored in poetry in college.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to be a Good Mom. It’s out today—January 21, 2025!
What number book is this for you?
It’s my fifth, though it’s my first in nonfiction, which feels very new.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
When I talk about it, I say it’s half memoir, half research. (So, memoir plus, if we’re using that term.) It feels funny to call it memoir because my story isn’t particularly exceptional—I struggled a lot in early motherhood, in ways I’ve since learned lots of new mothers struggle, and I drew on research to understand the cultural and historical origins of that. I think of the memoir as the spine that provides the structure for the research.
I started this book in the summer of 2018, when my kids were 3 and 5 and as I came up from the exhaustion of those early years of motherhood, I looked around me, like, What happened to me? That moment happened to coincide with a big boom in motherhood memoirs, and I read every book I could find that seemed like it would help me understand my own experience.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
The Good Mother Myth uses my own story of a rough transition into early motherhood alongside research and reporting to uncover the shoddy science beneath so many of our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. I looked at the midcentury psychologists and psychoanalysts like Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicott, and Mary Ainsworth whose research has shaped a lot of the expectations for mothers that are still with us today. It’s my hope that the book can provide comfort and companionship to new parents struggling, as I did, under the weight of our impossible and contradictory mythologies of motherhood—and point a way forward to a new conception of caregiving that doesn’t rely on one perfect mom.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I started this book in the summer of 2018, when my kids were 3 and 5 and as I came up from the exhaustion of those early years of motherhood, I looked around me, like, What happened to me? That moment happened to coincide with a big boom in motherhood memoirs, and I read every book I could find that seemed like it would help me understand my own experience. (Meaghan O’Connell’s And Then We Had Everything, Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped, Molly Caro May’s Body Full of Stars!) But none of those books fully answered the question that was pulling at me: if motherhood was, as I’d always been led to believe, “the most natural thing in the world,” why had I found it so hard?
That July, I had a week-long residency at the Sundress Academy for the Fine Arts in Knoxville, and I spent that week just typing everything I could think of into a Scrivener document. I went home with 20,000 words—mostly wild fragments—and a ton of excitement but not a lot of practical knowledge about how to start writing a book of nonfiction. So I had to learn all the practical stuff: what is a book proposal, how do I get an agent, how do I pitch essays.
Practically, I wanted to write a book that people would read. At that point, I’d published my first book of poetry, Double Jinx, which won the National Poetry Series, and a chapbook of poems, Acadiana. I’m really proud of both those books, but the audience for poetry is so, so small. I knew that writing prose would open up a new world of readers for me. (Though I think lots of people who “don’t get” poetry would love it if they could read it without the decoder ring approach that I think a lot of English teachers use!) And the project I was imagining, which had memoir and tons of research, needed the space of prose.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
It was a long journey to finding an agent—I started querying in January 2020 (sob) and signed with my (amazing) agent in April 2022. Along the way, I got a ton of the kind of rejections that break your heart—the writing is so beautiful, but I just can’t figure out how to sell it/motherhood’s a really crowded market, etc. I got one on New Year’s Eve 2020 that I’ll always remember: the writing was good, the agent said, but because there are so many books in this area, “any material on this topic really needs to transcend what’s out there.” I mean, that’s not wrong. I wrote that on an index card and taped it on the wall in my home office. I kept going.
Fortunately, I’m incredibly stubborn, and I kept working on the book, refining the concept and reimagining the structure. I read John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story to teach myself something about structure and plot. I read every book that came out in the world of motherhood memoirs and dove into research on hormones and nursing and postpartum mood and anxiety disorders and parenting across the primate kingdom. I published my second book of poetry, Pocket Universe, and co-edited an anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I think of as the poetry cousins to The Good Mother Myth. That work was important in terms of developing a platform, of course, but it also helped me feel a sense of momentum with my writing and sustained my faith that there’s always room for more good writing on the topics that matter the most to me.
Working on The Long Devotion was especially important in those pandemic years; for a long time my co-editor Emily Pérez was my top contact in my phone, and we traded off the work, but maybe more importantly, we took turns being the project’s cheerleader when we hit hard parts. The writers whose work we included in that anthology—mothers who had abortions, miscarriages, and stillbirth; foster and adoptive mothers; mothers managing their own and their children’s chronic illness and mental illness; women who’d chosen not to become mothers; people whose journey into parenthood was long and complex; and more—did so much to enrich and challenge and expand my understanding of the labor and joys of mothering. Those perspectives improved The Good Mother Myth, too.
We sold the book on proposal in April 2023, and it was due in January 2024, so after all those years of researching and writing and rethinking, the full draft came together in just under nine months. It was the most intense writing experience of my life.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I’m not sure that I fully processed that what I was writing was going to be a book—like, something anyone could pick up and read—until really late in the process. Actually writing it—doing all the research, getting the structure to work, explaining the research in a way that’s accurate and accessible—was a challenge that occupied all my attention and brainpower. I was aware of how much I was exposing about myself, but as a poet who’s long written largely autobiographically, that felt comfortable and important.
Just before I submitted the final draft, I had a moment of panic about how my husband might feel about his appearance in the book. Though he doesn’t write anymore, he was a poet when we met, so he understands both the desire to write about your own life and also that such writing is only ever one version of the story. But early parenthood was tough on our marriage, and I wrote about that really candidly. I thought was important to share with readers, but it was even more important to me that he not be hurt. I printed out the whole manuscript and flagged the parts where he appears and wrote him a long note about it. Despite my panic, it wasn’t a big deal: he flipped through it, and it was fine.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
One book that helped me imagine the form of my book is Molly Wizenberg’s The Fixed Stars. When I signed with my agent, that version of the proposal was much more like an academic book, and I was bringing this real anxious graduate student energy to it—like, let me prove that I’ve done my research, which does not actually make for a friendly reading experience. My agent pushed me to bring my poet-brain in and rethink the structure and the tone.
I’d read The Fixed Stars shortly after it came out in 2020 and had thought, oh, I wish I could write a book like that—flexible in its structure, with all these vignettes and short chapters inside sections; moving through time and bringing in research in this way that felt very organic. And of course my book is very different than Wizenberg’s, but that openness in structure helped me reimagine my book.
The Good Mother Myth uses my own story of a rough transition into early motherhood alongside research and reporting to uncover the shoddy science beneath so many of our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. I looked at the midcentury psychologists and psychoanalysts like Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicott, and Mary Ainsworth whose research has shaped a lot of the expectations for mothers that are still with us today.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
I think anyone who wants to publish a book has to be incredibly stubborn. The market is always crowded, publishing is always struggling. So you have to be ready for so many nos and so much rejection, and you have to keep an ear out for which rejections are telling you something, and which you can put aside.
That agent who told me “work had to stand out” was absolutely correct, and I worked for years after that to ensure this book did. But lots of rejections—I don’t see how to market this, there are already so many motherhood books, books like this don’t sell—aren’t actually information, and those you have to learn to just shake off. You have to believe in your own work, and you also have to be receptive to feedback that will push your work forward.
What do you love about writing?
The satisfaction of having all the parts come together. I’m a really messy, wasteful writer—for anything I’ve ever published, I’ve probably written at least 2-3 times as many words in my notebook and my earlier drafts—and what I’ve come to really love, especially in prose, is the stage of deep revision. I love to print it all out, cut up the pieces, move things around, figure out how it all fits together.
What frustrates you about writing?
The gap between my dream of what a piece can be and what actually happens, especially in the first draft. It’s tempting sometimes to never write at all but instead to just carry around that image of the perfect thing you’ll never quite be able to make.
What about writing surprises you?
I believe that our writing brains know more than our conscious, intellectual brains do. This is going to sound very woo, but once or twice I’ve written something in a poem, then months later been like, Oh, I was telling the future.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times?
My brain is always clearest in the morning, but I’ve also had to learn to not be too precious about the process. What I’ve learned really does help is a certain amount of planning: at the end of the day, I make a little list on a post-it note of what I’m working on the next day. I’m most able to make use of my writing time if I’m not starting by deciding what I’m going to do.
I think anyone who wants to publish a book has to be incredibly stubborn. The market is always crowded, publishing is always struggling. So you have to be ready for so many nos and so much rejection, and you have to keep an ear out for which rejections are telling you something, and which you can put aside.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I don’t have any other creative hobbies. Exercise is an essential part of my writing process, though. I’m not athletic—like, not a team sports kind of person—so it took me a long time to learn that my brain does best with a fairly high level of physical activity. If I’m stuck in my writing, a walk can often get me going again. Parts of this book were written at the exercise studio where I do barre and pilates—I’m sure I looked a little wacky sometimes sitting in the hallway, scribbling in the notebook I keep in my gym bag, but that was where I did some of my best thinking when I was really in it with the book.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I’m working my way around the edges of a new book, about the feminist history of homemaking and how we can rethink our way of understanding home in an era of social isolation and climate change.
I am so excited for this book! And I loved reading this, Nancy and Sari :)
This sounds like such a necessarily honest read.