THINKERS WHO MOTHER

Welcome to the Women’s History Month edition of Thinkers Who Mother—and now strap yourselves in because this won’t be entirely cheery.

At a time when surreal and chilling headlines are the daily norm, I found two recent stories so uniquely surreal and chilling that they’ve been keeping me awake at night. The first was the news that the Taliban has legalized gender-based domestic violence in Afghanistan, making it permissible for a man to beat his wife as long as he doesn’t don’t break bones or leave open wounds. (Yes, you read this correctly.) As Afghan journalist and rights activist Mahbouba Seraj explained to CNN, “The men have the right to rule completely the women. His word is the word of law—that’s it.”

It’s tempting to believe such a nightmare can only exist elsewhere, in faraway places where men have lost their minds. For most of my life, I blithely and naively believed this—but I no longer have this luxury.

The domestic developments of the past few years have given women—and those men secure enough with themselves to care about us—plenty of reasons to feel unsafe: the re-election of a sexual predator to the nations’s highest office, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the scrubbing of data related to "women” and "equity" from federal agency websites. Now, a new Kings College London survey is providing more fodder for alarm, revealing that a third of Gen Z males globally (and nearly a quarter in the US) believe that “a wife should always obey her husband,” giving him the final say in all decisions. This is double the number of baby boomers surveyed who share this view, making it impossible to ignore that there’s a terrifying shift afoot for our daughters—and our sons, who are being duped by our leaders and social media influencers into believing that the key to their happiness is women’s subjugation.

Against this grim backdrop, what gives me hope? For starters, the many incredible organizations working tirelessly to protect the rights of girls and women. Some favorites I support are Equality Now, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Vote Mama Foundation. And because I believe that literature is one of the most powerful ways of exposing injustice from the inside out, I’m heartened by the writers telling stories that insist, with their every word, on the fullness of women’s humanity.

This month’s newsletter is a rallying cry. But it’s also a love note to thinkers everywhere doing the hard work of reminding us that our freedom as women is fragile—and must be vigilantly stood up for.

—Nicole

THINKER SPOTLIGHT

I can’t utter the the name Jill Christman without pausing to rhapsodize about the literary journal River Teeth, which she co-edits out of Ball State University with her husband, poet Mark Neely. River Teeth is an ardent champion of creative nonfiction and one of the few lit magazines dedicated entirely to the genre. Two of the essays in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters found their first home there—an early vote of confidence for which I’ll be forever grateful.

Over time, I’ve gotten to know Christman as a writer as well, becoming a tremendous admirer of her work. So I was excited for the chance to read and blurb an early copy of her new memoir The Heart Folds Early, a courageous and deeply human account of her decision, twenty years ago, to have a second trimester abortion after learning that—due to a rare genetic condition—the baby she was carrying had only half a heart.

I cried reading this book—and miraculously, because of the sort of writer Christman is, I also laughed. And I simmered with rage as I considered that today, in our post-Roe reality, there are women in Jill’s position who aren’t at liberty to make this same choice at all. As I wrote in my blurb: “The Heart Folds Early is a breathtaking journey into the mind of a mother grappling with an impossible choice. Jill Christman has written a profoundly generous book, offering her story with open palms and, in doing so, affirming the right of every woman to be the authority on her own body and life.”

What a privilege to be able to chat with Christman about her decision to write this important book—and her dreams for it now that it’s out in the world.

———————

NGL: You first attempted to write this story decades ago, but it wasn’t until the reversal of Roe v. Wade that you found the fortitude to return to your manuscript. How did the Dobbs Decision impact your perspective on your abortion experience and your desire to write about it?

JC: First, Nicole, I want to thank you for inviting me to do this interview with you. I’m a huge fan of your work and it’s an honor to talk nonfiction writing, motherhood, and reproductive justice with you. 

The Dobbs decision was the reason I returned to the unfinished manuscript. I write about this in my Acknowledgements: “The heart folds early—that’s a fact—but The Heart Folds Early, this book, took a ridiculously long time to gestate. Longer than you might be imagining….First, I tried very hard to write it, and then I tried very hard to not write it, but after the Dobbs Decision eliminated Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion, I rewrote the whole book like my skirt was on fire and only the book would put it out before I burned.” 

My first memoir—Darkroom: A Family Exposure—took about three years to write; The Heart Folds Early, my third, took nearly twenty. I don’t think my students like to hear that! Every book makes its way into the world on its own time, fueled by a particular fire. Of course, like all of us, I was flattened by the news that SCOTUS had overturned Roe v. Wade’s protections. Already, I hadn’t been able to find the book I needed to read about a woman making a choice to end a pregnancy midterm because of a fatal anomaly (fewer than 3% of all abortions—but, still, the stories must be out there).

After Dobbs, I understood it was my responsibility to tell the story. I had the skills and the resources to write this book, so I knew that if I didn’t offer my story with open hands to be part of a more nuanced, complex, productive conversation about reproductive rights and the nature of choice, well, I was shirking my responsibilities—as a citizen, a woman, a writer, a teacher, and a mother.

Also, I was pissed. I’ve never met a secret or a silence that helped anyone—except those trying to define and control the narrative. 

NGL: Your book’s title, The Heart Folds Early, is so resonant and haunting. Can you share a bit about how you landed on it?

The Heart Folds Early was—and remains—the title of the chapter about trying to conceive and carry a pregnancy after the baby we called Baby Brother. After our unborn son’s diagnosis, a nurse said these very words to me —“the heart folds early”—by way of comfort, by way of saying that long before we knew our baby had only half a heart, his fate had already been written. A fetal heart begins the process of folding (which, because of the verb, I always imagined as a kind of elaborate origami) around week five, and by week eight or nine, the heart is a miniature version of itself. If all goes well, that heart has four functioning chambers; in Baby Brother’s case, he had just two—and no aorta.

The title also references everything we carry in our hearts from the beginning of our lives—the pain and the fear, but also the love. This book is full of love. 

NGL: I adore your warm and approachable narrative voice. Reading this book felt like spending time with a smart, down to earth friend with a great sense of humor. Given the seriousness of your subject matter, was it hard to strike this tone?

JC: First of all, we need to hang out more—in real, off-the-page life! I love that the book felt that way to you, and I’ve been really happy to hear similar reports from other readers. Unputdownable–that’s what I wanted. I wanted to open up a place in the middle of my big, messy, beautiful, love-filled life where a horrible thing happened and I needed to make a choice. Just because we’re navigating a trauma doesn't mean we leave all that we are behind, right?

I wouldn’t say striking that tone was hard, but keeping it was the trick. I had to give myself permission to be my full self, to let the humor stay when it emerged. Maybe this is another way we push back against the forces that tell us we can only tell an abortion story one way? I mean, the night before the abortion, it rained shit in our hotel room. I could not make this up. Plus, I live among very funny people. Our then four-year-old daughter, Ella, was acting out scenes of pregnancy as part of her own process of coping—this was heartbreaking and often hilarious.

Of course, time helps, and the perspective is genuine. We’re never alone in our specific tragedies—not even that day. I try hard to keep my eyes open. I’m like that as a person, so when the humor comes into the writing at a dark moment, I welcome the respite. The hard stuff will always be there, so when I can laugh, I laugh. By coming up for air and light, we can go even deeper into the hard stuff. 

NGL: Describing the time after your abortion, you write that you and Mark “needed to grieve, and grieving didn’t mean regret.”

In my opinion, the magical thing that creative nonfiction can do—as opposed to an op-ed, say—is illuminate the gray areas of being human. When it comes to politicized issues like abortion, the pressure to submit to either/or thinking is particularly heightened. Was it your goal to capture the “gray” of this experience as you lived it?

JC: Thank you, Nicole—this was so important to me, and you’ve put your finger right on one of the hardest things about writing this book. The rhetoric and rules of how we talk about the choice to seek an abortion come at us from all sides. At every turn, I found myself having to push them away so I could tell the truth of our experience. What language was I allowed to use? Could I say “baby” instead of “fetus”?  Was the abortion an “abortion”? A “D&E”? Or something less loaded, like a “surgery”?

Also, “I” am often a “we” in the book. If I said that Mark was part of this decision because this was our child together, was I being a bad feminist? The ultimate choice was mine because this was happening in my body, and Mark was there. If I told the truth about the deep grief we experienced after ending the pregnancy, would that read as regret? We had wanted this baby desperately, and his loss (death? termination?) was dismantling—and we could not choose suffering for him. If I said I was choosing against this baby’s suffering, was I casting judgement on the mother who chose to carry her baby to term and love him through every surgery, fight with him for every breath? I don’t want my choice to be anything but my choice. I can’t know the inside of another person’s choice. 

What this book allowed me to do is so different from what the world allowed me to do: I was visibly pregnant, and then I was not—and there was no baby. This is not something we talk about in the mailroom, right? There has been “a loss”—and we all move past and around it until it fades. Here I got to say the true things I couldn’t say before. What a gift.

READING THOUGHTS

Last year, a month before Mothers and Other Fictional Characters was published, I attended a bookstore event celebrating the release of After Lives, an essay collection by the writer and biographer Megan Marshall, one of my teachers in the Emerson College MFA program.

Several of my former classmates were also in the audience, and after the reading, we gathered together to catch up, sharing our excitement about Marshall’s new book—her most personal yet, a blend of memoir and biography illuminating the shrouded corners American womanhood and motherhood in the last century. “It’s so wonderful,” my friend Laura said, “that you and Megan are getting your books out into the world while you still can. Who knows how much longer truth-telling books by women won’t be censored or banned.”

At first I assumed she was joking, and nearly laughed. But then I did not laugh, because it hit me that her tone wasn’t jokey at all. And in that moment, I experienced a strange and sudden sensation of vertigo. It wasn’t what Laura said as much as the casualness of her delivery that made me acutely aware of how thin the guardrail is between the usual and the dystopic—between life as we expect it to be and the stuff of nightmares.

Laura’s words have haunted me ever since, but they’ve also galvanized me. My growing awareness of the provisional state of women’s freedom of expression has made me double down on my own truth-telling, saying things—during author panels, in interviews, and in my daily life—that I formerly might have shied away from.

I originally wanted to use this newsletter section to highlight my all time favorite truth-speaking memoirs by women—but then I realized that seventy-five percent of my bookshelf is occupied by truth-speaking memoirs by women! So for now, I’ll share three of my most recent favorites, all of which I heartily recommend:

• Tomboyland by Melissa Faliveno

  Have you ever discovered a book so resonant and up your alley that it seems impossible it existed in the world a single day without your reading it? That’s how I felt reading Faliveno’s brilliant and boundary-breaking collection of essays exploring girlhood, womanhood, and the constrictions of the gender binary—all set against the transporting, tornado-swept backdrop of the American midwest.

• Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul

  I was recently on a panel with Slate writer Scaachi Koul at WBUR’s CitySpace in Boston, and I can honestly say that I’ve never laughed so hard during an author event. In this trenchant and irreverent essay collection about the dissolution of her marriage—and her subsequent rediscovery of self—Koul is as sharp and fearless and funny on the page as she is in person.

• The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly

  Have you read Beth Ann Fennelly’s beloved first book of micro-memoirs Heating & Cooling? If not, do yourself a favor and double it up with this shimmering new follow-up. In The Irish Goodbye, Fennelly turns her penetrating eye to marriage, motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood, and grief, showing how close attention to life’s smallest moments is its own kind of activism.

LISTENING THOUGHTS

Now that Boston’s walls of snow have finally melted and my walks with the dog are growing longer, I’ve enjoyed catching up on some of my favorite podcasts. Historically, I’ve gravitated toward ones about books and writing craft. But lately I’ve found myself craving the companionship of thinkers who are taking on some of the thorniest aspects of womanhood and gender dynamics in our current moment.

If you’re up for listening to smart, trenchant commentary of this nature, I highly recommend these three, for starters!

• This Week In Breeders with Sarah Wheeler and Garrett Bucks

  I’ve long been a fan of Sarah Wheeler’s (also excellent!) podcast The Mother of It All, so I was so excited to learn she was starting a second one with her friend Garrett Bucks, a writer, organizer, and (male!) fellow feminist. Each episode unpacks a particular aspect of heterosexual marriage, parenthood and nuclear family life—and in a way that makes you feel like you’re hanging out at a casual potluck with hilarious friends.

• History Chicks with Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider

  This podcast dives into the life stories of notable women in history, from Cleopatra and Pocahontas to Josephine Baker and Lucille Ball. Many of the episodes contain eerie and eye-opening parallels to our present day, such as the recent one about Victorian activist Elizabeth Packard, committed by her husband to a mental institution for disobeying him by speaking her mind (which I suppose a third of Gen Z men would think is…awesome?)

• Dire Straights with Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei

  On this podcast, two of my favorite contemporary cultural critics examine the ways the political becomes personal—and vice versa—in the world of heterosexual relationships. I’ve loved their deep dives into topics like the “hetero-politics of ICE” and intimacy as the “fifth shift of women’s work.” Every time I finish an episode, I feel I as if I understand our culture’s current regressive trends—and my own place within them—more deeply.

Before I go, I wanted to let you know about two events on the horizon I’m particularly excited about:

• On Wednesday April 29th, I’ll be at Belmont Books in Belmont, MA, to celebrate the release of the anthology No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, edited by the wonderful Jenny Bartoy.

  I’m so honored to be a contributor to this beautiful, urgent, deeply moving book exploring an aspect of human experience too often accompanied by silence and shame. Its pages includes work by Cheryl Strayed, Domenica Ruta, Nick Flynn, Stephanie Foo, Erika Krouse, Alyson Shelton and so many other writers I admire, and I just know this book will be a welcome balm for anyone who’s experienced estrangement from a loved one, no matter the circumstances. I can’t wait for it to be out in the world.

  I hope you’ll join me, Bartoy, and fellow contributor Eben E. B. Bein for this event! More info here. And if you don’t live in Boston, never fear—No Contact is available for online preorder.

• And finally, on May 5, Off Assignment is offering a 4-session course on “Writing Motherhood,” taught by the wonderful writer and photographer Erika Morillo. I’ll be one of the four guest authors visiting, along with Quiara Alegria Hudes, Jazmina Barrera, and Rachel Yoder. Would love to see you there! You can learn more and sign up here.

NICOLE GRAEV LIPSON

I’m the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, a USA Today national bestseller. My writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other places. My work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays 2024. Originally from New York City, I live outside of Boston with my family.