Mothers and Other Fictional Characters
A Memoir in Essays
by Nicole Graev Lipson
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Mar 04 2025 | Archive Date Mar 03 2025
Chronicle Books | Chronicle Prism
Talking about this book? Use #MothersandOtherFictionalCharacters #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
“This is—for real—a masterwork, one I will return to over and over." —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
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.
What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she’s testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she’s raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.
As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin’s erotic story “The Storm” helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth’s most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one’s frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare’s gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.
Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves—and the ones we’re still becoming.
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781797228563 |
PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
PAGES | 248 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
This is one of those books that you deeply submerge yourself into, and when you are done, you feel changed. You feel seen. You've experienced--and grasped--something beautiful, something meaningful. This is a literary masterpiece that every mother and every woman must devour. I envy those who get to read it for the first time. Meanwhile, I gratefully join the ranks of those who will undoubtedly return to it over and over through the ensuing years. Brava, Nicole Graev Lipson! (less)
What a beautiful book. I felt transported in each of the chapters. When the chapters ended, I feel like it took me a while to break from the book and come back to my real life. The author writes so beautifully, the images and scenes really come alive through description and through the literary comparisons. She explores topics that I am forever pondering (motherhood, mother/daughter relationships, aging as a woman, death, solitude, a mother's sense of time) in such a way that I have never seen done before. Highly recommend!
Thank you NetGalley and Chronicle books for this ARC!
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Desiree Akhavan
Biographies & Memoirs, Essays & Collections, Humor & Satire
Helen Murray Taylor
Biographies & Memoirs, Health, Mind & Body, Self-Help