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 123rd installment, featuring Nicole Graev Lipson, author of the memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, River Teeth, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. Originally from New York City, Lipson received her MFA from Emerson College and lives outside of Boston with her family.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 48. I’ve been writing since the third grade when our teacher, Ms. Beyers, gave each of us our own writing notebook. Every week we’d write a new story inspired by a prompt, and then we’d share our stories aloud during class. I couldn’t believe something so fun could happen at school.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters—published in March 2025 by Chronicle Books.
What number book is this for you?
This is my first book.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters explores the world’s strange and relentless desire to reduce women to stock characters, and how easy it is to find ourselves complicit in this process, until we no longer know what parts of us are real. I mine this territory by writing as intimately and honestly as I possibly can about the many ways fiction has infiltrated my life—as a girl, a young adult, a mother, and a woman at middle age—and by searching the work of my literary foremothers for clues to truer ways of being.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a memoir in essays. I wanted each chapter to be able to live on its own as a complete narrative, but there’s also a clear dramatic arc to the book as a whole that I hope will feel propulsive to readers. Being human has never felt like a linear experience to me, but more like a series of forays that build on one another, reverberating in surprising ways. I hope my book captures this episodic quality, but also the pattern and meaning that become visible in a life over time.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters explores the world’s strange and relentless desire to reduce women to stock characters, and how easy it is to find ourselves complicit in this process, until we no longer know what parts of us are real. I mine this territory by writing as intimately and honestly as I possibly can about the many ways fiction has infiltrated my life—as a girl, a young adult, a mother, and a woman at middle age—and by searching the work of my literary foremothers for clues to truer ways of being. In this way, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is as much about the subversive power of reading as it is about womanhood.
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?
My junior year in college, I stumbled into a course called The Art of the Essay, taught by the brilliant professor Lydia Fakundiny. I’d spent my whole life up until that point feeling like everyone else on earth knew what we were all doing here, what this business of being human was all about, while I’d somehow missed the memo. Maybe all writers feel like this a little? Reading essays by James Baldwin and George Orwell and Cynthia Ozick and others, I was thrilled to discover that there was entire genre dedicated to grappling with confusion, where bewilderment and ambivalence could not only be laid bare, but turned into art.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters was born, like everything I’ve written, from a desire to sort through confusion. I wanted to figure out once and for all why being a woman has so often felt to me like a pantomime of sorts, as if I’m half-me and half someone-not-quite-me. This feeling has haunted me since adolescence, but becoming a mother intensified it—probably because motherhood demands such an absurd amount of theater.
It was hard for me to carve out space to write when my children were very little. But when my youngest turned three, I was overcome by a resolve that was like nothing I’d felt before and perhaps never will again—a fierce, bodily, all-consuming determination. Motherhood did two things to me as a writer. First, it made me understand in a visceral way that time is finite, that it presses onward, and that it’s up to us to use as our heart most deeply longs to. And second, it magnified a thousand times all of the concerns and injustices that have always consumed me, because having children made the stakes more urgent than ever. It was one thing for our culture’s misogynistic beauty standards to turn me against my body, for instance, but the thought of my daughters one day despising their own perfect bodies, or of my son suppressing his tender spirit to adhere to masculine norms, pulled me to the page in whole new way. Motherhood was the fire in this book’s forging process.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
Since my main goal was to crack through the surface stories of womanhood, I was determined to be truthful about my experiences not just on the level of the story or sentence, but on the level of the word—to weigh each word for its factual and emotional veracity. The writer Brenda Ueland had a wonderful term for this sort of through-and-through accuracy: “microscopic truth.” I’m not sure it’s possible to have true sentences or a true story if you don’t build these from true words. I put every single word of this book on trial. No describing the water as “blue” if it was really “stone-gray.” No describing my love for my complicated middle child as “devoted” if it is really more like “athletic.” This made the writing process painstaking at times—but also exhilarating. Each true word I wrote was like a knot on a rope leading me to stranger territory.
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 handled it by lying awake at night, certain I was the most depraved person on earth, to be turning the people I love most in the world into characters in a book. I’m just not sure there’s any way around this basic ethical glitch when writing memoir?
In the morning, though, I’d feel a little better and forge onward, determined to write about my real-life subjects with love and deep regard, and to do no harm. For me, doing no harm did mean changing some names and identifying details. I used my children’s real names in the drafting process but changed them in the final round of edits to create a small buffer between them and the world. Interestingly, all of the people I write about most intimately—including my husband and my dearest friend Sara—requested that I use their real names, which felt like a really beautiful gesture of faith and trust.
There’s one essay in the book—about my brief but utterly destabilizing attraction to a younger man fifteen years into my marriage—that I knew I wouldn’t write without my husband’s blessing. When I broached it with him, he said, “It’s not my place to say what you’re allowed to write—I’ll just have to decide if I want to read it.” Can you see why I’m deeply in love with this man? It can’t be easy being married to a memoirist, but he put ego aside to make space for the work that called to me. I’m not sure there’s any purer form of love than this. That essay is now my book’s opening chapter, and the overture to every single word that follows.
I wanted each chapter to be able to live on its own as a complete narrative, but there’s also a clear dramatic arc to the book as a whole that I hope will feel propulsive to readers. Being human has never felt like a linear experience to me, but more like a series of forays that build on one another, reverberating in surprising ways. I hope my book captures this episodic quality, but also the pattern and meaning that become visible in a life over time.
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.)
The inspiration of writers is so central to my existence that it’s a central thread of the book, even on the level of plot. Often, the inspiration is the drama, as I bring to life my encounters with works by Kate Chopin, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Doris Lessing, Elif Shafak, and others. For me, reading has never felt separate from living but deeply entwined with it, and I loved trying to dramatize the heady, corporeal experience of being changed by a book.
In terms of craft, I’m most inspired by memoirs and collections that blend the sensual and the cerebral, the embodied and the intellectual. Some favorites are Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, Caroline Knapp’s Appetites, JoAnna Novak’s Contradiction Days, Kathryn Schulz’s Lost and Found, Jerald Walker’s Magically Black, Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily, Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass, Eula Biss’s On Immunity, Jia Tolentino’ Trick Mirror. I could go on but will stop here.
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’m going to quote Brenda Ueland again because her book If You Want to Write was such a comfort for me while I was working on this memoir. You’ll need to forgive the universal male pronouns (Ueland was writing in 1938, which is miraculous to me because her insights feel so modern), but the quote is: “Everybody is original if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self, and not from the self he thinks he should be.”
This is such simple advice, but also so profound. I know firsthand how easy it is to default to writing from a place of should, which in the end is a pretty dreary place to write from. While I was working on this book, pushing past should to write from a place of what is—in all its messiness and weirdness and beauty and splendor—made the writing process far more fun and surprising than it would otherwise have been. So I suppose my advice would be to try to let go of all the shoulds in the writing process. It’s far harder to feel intimidated by things when they’re a little fun.
What do you love about writing?
I’m a slow processor and thinker. It can take me a long time to formulate my thoughts, and then to put these thoughts into words. I spend a lot of time staring into space and daydreaming, and in real time this doesn’t always make me the quickest, wittiest companion--I often feel like I’m one step behind everyone else. But alone with a blank page, I can luxuriate in my slowness. I have space to think things through as fully as I want, and to translate my thoughts into words that feel right and good.
What frustrates you about writing?
I always feel a little indignant, when I begin a new essay, to discover that I’ve forgotten how to write one. You would think that the process would get easier every time, and that having done this before would prepare a person do it again. But not so! Every time I’ve re-read one of my published essays, I’ve thought, How the hell did I do that? It feels so unfair that I must start from scratch every time, but I’m sure this invention process is what gives a piece of writing a soul. ChatGPT invents nothing, and it has no soul.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters was born, like everything I’ve written, from a desire to sort through confusion. I wanted to figure out once and for all why being a woman has so often felt to me like a pantomime of sorts, as if I’m half-me and half someone-not-quite-me. This feeling has haunted me since adolescence, but becoming a mother intensified it—probably because motherhood demands such an absurd amount of theater.
What about writing surprises you?
I don’t generally consider myself a mystical person, but there are moments while writing that I feel electrically connected to the mysterious forces around us. I’ll be stuck on a certain scene, and a friend will call with a story that jogs my memory. Or I’ll have an idea for a new essay, and two days later our rabbi’s shabbat sermon will touch on its themes. I’m not sure how to account for these cosmic interventions, but they’re thrilling when they happen.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I write daily-ish, but not strictly daily. I try as often as I can to carve out stretches of writing in the morning, before my mind becomes clouded by emails and the grocery list and calls from the school nurse. Every so often, I abscond from my family for a day or two so I can binge-write for uninterrupted stretches. It’s wondrous what can happen with no interruptions. I can write in twenty-four hours what typically takes weeks.
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’ve been a runner for years, and running absolutely helps unloose the ideas in my brain. I also find it far easier to endure the stillness of writing after running, when my muscles and nerves have been quieted.
For the last fourteen years, my main creative pursuit besides writing has been raising my three children, which involves near-constant improvisation, invention, imagination, and revision. Being a mother has made me a better writer, but writing has also made me a more attentive and versatile mother.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
My next book is currently a thrilling, hazy, half-baked idea I’m too superstitious to talk about it. But I hope to be back here in a couple years to do just that!
Thanks for sharing your experiences about writing. I liked your mention of cosmic interventions that loosen or guide you when you become stuck in your writing. Not everyone would recognize the correlation.
I love this so much - and there are too many inspiring and wonderful quotes to highlight in one comment! I do have a general request/question - I’d love to get a window into the Memoir Land writers’ practical reality of how they make money. Maybe that’s too personal, but it’s a big part of my continuing quest to create a life that supports writing while also supporting myself materially. I often look for clues in the question about their writing routine to get a sense of whether they’re making money through other jobs (I think some authors I’ve read here are also professors or support themselves through their Substack?) or have made enough through writing books/stories alone. Thank you for all you do for all of us readers and writers who treasure the sense of community we find here! Xo