Brookline author Nicole Graev Lipson unmasks the fictions that shape motherhood — and herself

Boston Globe

04-03-2025

Some books crack wide open our understanding of what it is to exist in this world.
'I wanted to explore the blurry boundary between truth and fiction when one is a woman,' Lipson, who lives in Brookline, said, 'and how easy it is to find ourselves performing fictional versions of who we are.'
In 12 essays, Lipson mines her experience as a case study to peel away these fictions and reach for a deeper reality. Peppering her explorations with examples from literature, philosophy, and pop culture from Shakespeare to Eddie Vedder, from Maya Angelou's memoir 'Mom & Me & Mom' to the film 'Mean Girls,' she critiques herself and her relationships with candor and empathy, prompting the reader to awakenings of their own.
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The award-winning writer and Emerson College MFA program alumna will discuss 'Mothers' with author Joanna Rakoff at an event for Brookline Booksmith at
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Q
. In the essay 'Thinkers Who Mother,' you shine a light on the often-unrecognized deep thinking that goes into mothering. How are mothers thinkers?
A
. The term 'mental load' is used a lot in terms of the minutiae that mothers have to contend with, the calendaring and remembering. It implies busy work. But if you think about a mother's day, and all of the resources we're drawing on in real time, observing our children and attuning to their needs and to the situation at hand, the complexity is profound.
We're making hypotheses and calculations, and all of them have a rationale that comes from experience, from years of gathered wisdom, from what we've learned from our children, and they from us, in this complex symbiosis. There is this age-old distinction in western culture between thought and feeling, and historically, thought has been connected to the male realm and valued over feeling. Mothering requires both feeling and deep, deep thinking, happening together and fueling each other.
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Q.
In 'The Friendship Plot,' you argue against the idea that deep fellowship is experienced only by men, a concept reinforced by the likes of Montaigne and Plato.
A.
Few places in our culture have done justice to the incredible life-changing, soul-nourishing, politically meaningful power of close female friendships. Our closest friends can be the mirrors through which we discover ourselves; the bridges we cross to more fully become ourselves. So often, close female relationships, if not trivialized, are demonized. Gendered terms like 'cliques' in middle school or 'coven of witches' illustrate the ways our culture treats them with suspicion. In a patriarchy, close female friendships challenge the status quo. I wanted to step out of the fictions that our culture teaches us about drama between women and celebrate my long-term friendship. In some ways, friendship is the purest form of care and love because there is no obligation built into it. It is freely chosen.
Q.
In this book, you also examine cultural archetypes that apply to men, specifically as they relate to your son and your mothering of him.
A.
Yes, it's not simply women who have to contend with these fictional characters. Men have templates pressed upon them too, and I've thought a lot while raising my son about how to protect him from cultural messages about what makes a 'man.' Unfortunately, the dominant narratives about manhood still insist that men are stoic, tough, above feeling, and violent. In the essay 'Tikkun Olam Ted,' I write about a time when my worry about our culture's impact on my son gets turned toward him and in some ways taken out on him, as I interpret his actions — behaving in ways that were embarrassing to me at Tikkun Olam Day at Hebrew school, a day devoted to goodness and repair — through the lens of what I fear him becoming as opposed to what he actually is and the goodness that lives inside of him. My son, contrary to stereotypes, might just be the most deeply feeling of my three children, and I've often talked to him about how this is his superpower.
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Q.
You examine the concept of solitude and mothers' guilty cravings for alone time in 'A Place, and a State of Affairs.' What literary references helped you process this?
A.
I'm an introvert who needs a great deal of alone time in order to function, and having children is hard to reconcile with alone time for women. I tried to hold up my experiences chafing against the constant togetherness of family life within the broader context of the stories we've absorbed about solitude. Canonical works of American literature — whether it's 'Moby Dick' or Thoreau's 'Walden' — promote this romantic idealization of the solitary seeker.
Becoming a mother brought home how this romantic ideal isn't accessible for women with children. In books like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', we see a woman who longs for solitude and some escape from her children. And ultimately, the only way she can get it is to walk into the ocean and drown herself. This is a recurring motif throughout literature, that the only way for mothers to access that silence is through death. What is lost when women caring for the next generation don't have access to solitude as a way of replenishing themselves?
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Q.
Later in the book, you question your relationship to aging when, in your 40s, you begin to obsess over becoming a 'hot mom.' How did your perspective transform?
A.
That essay helped me learn two things. One, how much women in our culture are trained to confuse desirability with desire. When I started to wear sparkly tank tops and do Pure Barre and buy expensive face creams, what I truly wanted wasn't to be 'hot,' but to feel like I was still vital and alive.
And two, while I was holding up the 20-something Pure Barre instructors with shiny hair as models of womanhood that I should aspire to, I realized that the most powerful role models throughout my life have been older women: my high school English teacher, my college writing professor, my neighbor who's this brilliant rabbi and writer — all wise, experienced women with the inner strength to set the terms of their own mattering. Those are the people I genuinely long to be like one day.
Interview has been edited and condensed.