Mothers & Other
Fictional Characters

In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives.

“Narrated with warmth, empathy, honesty, humor, urgency, and ferocious intelligence, this is―for real―a masterwork, one I will return to over and over.”

—JOANNA RAKOFF, author of My Salinger Year

“This unforgettable debut…saw me for the woman I am today, while summoning the sensitive but ferocious creature that I can become tomorrow. Buy it for everyone you love.”

—COURTNEY MAUM, author of The Year of the Horses

“Sensitive, searingly intelligent, and beautifully written, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters gives us motherhood in all its real-life and literary complexity. Nicole Graev Lipson has written an unexpectedly moving portrait of the thinker-mother, to use her own good term. I found profound relief and joyful camaraderie in these pages.”

—CLAIRE DEDERER, author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

“The essays in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters are candid, emotionally exacting, and intellectually rigorous. Nicole Graev Lipson is the real thing: a writer whose work furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society and reflects a steady, unflinching gaze at the truth.”

—ADRIENNE BRODEUR, author of Little Monsters

“Lipson’s searing curiosity and tenderness mixes the exacting brilliance of Rebecca Solnit and Deborah Levy with the compassion and lush prose of Maggie Smith and Kathryn Schulz. Her essays tumble thoughts like rocks until they shine, exploring the grief of parenting, the devastation of love, and the impossible stakes of wanting. This book cracked me open over and over again, and each essay restitched my heart into something new.”

 —KELLY McMASTERS, author of The Leaving Season

“I read Mothers and Other Fictional Characters straight through, savoring every elegant and assured page. Nicole Graev Lipson beautifully, deftly, compassionately captures the complexity of what it means to be a woman….This is one of those books I want to buy for every woman I know—especially for my grown daughters, and for my mother.”

—JAMIE QUATRO, author of Two-Step Devil

“Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a guide to ‘living our way’ closer to empathy, curiosity, and love. Nicole Graev Lipson’s roving intellect and fierce prose make me believe in the power of here, the whole day, tomorrow, and all our precious lives ahead of us. Beautiful, big-hearted, brilliant.”

—JOANNA NOVAK, author of Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood

"A lyrical, raw, and beautifully written exploration of the complicated tangle of being a woman, mother, partner, and thinker. Lipson doesn't swoop in with answers. Instead, she walks us through her own life, fortified by the words of other female writers, helping us see that when intellect and feeling come together they can fuel something far larger than the sum of its parts."

—PHYLLIS GRANT, author of Everything Is Under Control

“This magnificent debut places Nicole Graev Lipson squarely among the greatest memoirists and thinkers of our day. A work unlike any other, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters somehow articulates and elucidates all my vague, inchoate concerns about contemporary motherhood—or, actually, personhood—while also showing me the world I thought I knew in a completely different, more radiant light. I finished the book transformed.

 —JOANNA RAKOFF, author of My Salinger Year 

“Lipson invokes icons such as Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, and Kate Chopin as she tackles what it means to be a woman, mother, and thinker. The “thinking” here is key, and if there is a pleasure equal to watching Lipson’s brilliant mind at work it is the stunning prose that serves it. Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is an extraordinary debut, firmly establishing Lipson as a formidable new talent.”

—JERALD WALKER, author of Magically Black and Other Essays

"Nicole Graev Lipson beautifully mines the loaded territory of mothering, daughtering, friending, wifing, aging, and memory, through a complex and compelling lens of her wide-ranging literary influences, wrestling with how we become the people, parents, and lovers we are …. A profoundly relatable, timely, and urgent read.”

—GINA FRANGELLO, author of Blow Your House Down

“This unforgettable debut forges the sensuality of Miranda July, nuanced complexity of Claire Dederer, and animal energy of Vanessa Chakour into a book that saw me for the woman I am today, while summoning the sensitive but ferocious creature that I can become tomorrow. Buy it for everyone you love.”

—COURTNEY MAUM, author of The Year of the Horses

“Can ambiguity be rendered with precision?  Can doubt be expressed with the force of belief?  Nicole Graev Lipson makes these improbable feats look easy in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, which probes questions that have haunted women, and the daughters they’ve raised, for generations . . . . Lipson has written the book we’ve all been wanting, waiting, and needing to read.”

—MEGAN MARSHALL, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“‘For whom do we perform sacred motherhood?' Nicole Graev Lipson turns this question upside down and inside out in this frank, thoughtful, deeply felt collection. By owning her desire to embody the maternal ideal, Lipson illuminates its uninhabitable, blood-sucking center." 

—COURTNEY ZOFFNESS, author of Spilt Milk