Philosophical Force, Quiet Rumination: A Review of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

by Nicole Graev Lipson

Chronicle Prism, 2025; 248 pp; $17.95

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Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays is composed of 12 long-form essays on modern motherhood viewed through a literary lens. Lipson strikes an interesting balance between experience and analysis, calling up the writings of both male and female authors through the ages—from Shakespeare to Maya Angelou, Thoreau to Adrienne Rich—to make sense of her own role as a mother of three, a middle-aged woman moving through the stages of life, and a primary caregiver eking out a few moments (or possibly a whole weekend) to herself. 

Lipson is highly attuned to the role of literature in her life and how it has influenced her psychological and emotional development. She has gained myriad perspectives through reading, both in the present as a mother and in her past as a student and young teacher. “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me” is a piece as much about Chopin’s novel The Awakening as it is about Lipson’s mother’s affair and eventual divorce, and Lipson’s own thoughts about escaping her relatively happy marriage. She writes of Chopin’s classic, “There are books that seem to glide into our lives at a particular time as if by design, finishing thoughts just partially formed in our minds.” But this accomplished essayist doesn’t merely read; she reads closely, absorbing information from multiple texts, mulling it all over, and presenting it to us with fresh context.

These essays, which first appeared in publications like The Sun, River Teeth, and Virginia Quarterly Review, combine philosophical force and quiet rumination. Lipson’s facility with metaphor and her power of description are evident throughout. In “Very Nice Blastocytes,” a piece about infertility and reproductive ethics, she discovers she is pregnant with her third child naturally, after undergoing IVF with her first two pregnancies. She writes, “The fact that my own body could do this seemed as outlandish as discovering that my voice could break the sound barrier, or that my fingers could spin gold.”  

In this same piece, she visualizes her DNA retrospectively through the generations of her family. When she envisions her surplus embryos as “pulsing diamonds” or clings to them like “amulets, like rabbit’s feet, fearing what will happen if I let them go,” Lipson harnesses her imagination not to spiral off into the unknown but to make reality more vivid.

Throughout the book, Lipson provides unique insights on an array of subjects like gender, toxic masculinity, beauty, marriage, aging, and friendship, but she demonstrates the most clarity and creativity when she sets her sights on the book’s primary focus: motherhood. She observes the state of motherhood from an aerial view and puts it under a microscope. Her sweet spot is the evocative intersection of the body (connected by literal or figurative chords to children) and the mind (challenged by that ever-present tangle of chords). She writes, “If pregnancy sets in motion women’s reorientation from the cerebral to the biological, early motherhood has a way of cementing it.”  

Having been prescribed bed rest—an intervention that according to her research has not been medically proven to prevent preterm labor—she describes a stark and swift transformation. “That morning, I’d been the chair of an English department, in charge of a cadre of teachers and three classes of students. Now I was a vessel charged with not cracking open,” Lipson writes. The potentially reductive aspect of pregnancy and motherhood, the way that the body suddenly seems to take precedence over all else, is something I have personally grappled with, and I think many other mothers can relate. 

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is not a book driven by complaint; it’s neither whiny nor self-pitying. It is a book of inquiry and compilation, exposing Lipson’s innermost desires against a backdrop drawn from authors who preceded her. (To confirm how engaged this work is with the world of letters, check out her dazzling five-page “Sources and Works Consulted” section at the end!) In a climate of (wholly appropriate) maternal anger, kicked up in recent years by authors like Minna Dubin in Mom Rage, Amanda Montei in Touched Out, and Rachel Yoder in Nightbitch, Lipson observes the subject through slightly different apertures. It’s more maternal frustration and shame than rage, more contextualization than societal indictment. Her introspective questioning—of herself and other mothers of her time—doesn’t stem from a lack of confidence but from the strength to examine motherhood from as many angles as her perspective and privilege will permit, to change her mind over time, and to embody the notion that several things can be true at once. 

In “A Place, or a State of Affairs,” Lipson examines the perpetual problem of literal and psychological bandwidth. She hearkens back to Whitman’s famous refrain, “I contain multitudes,” then quickly observes, “Women have rarely been able to claim such multiplicity—and mothers, perhaps least of all.” She admits to a “voracious” craving for solitude since becoming a mother and also a deep desire to fully understand where it can lead, namely in the form of creativity. She endured in her early years as a mother “a flattening of my creative self” and wonders, “Is it a coincidence that neither Dickinson nor Woolf nor Bishop nor Sarton nor Gilbert nor Strayed (when she set out on her journey) had children? I don’t think so.”

I admire how the author doesn’t shy away from the difficulties and limitations of motherhood, but she also manages to speckle her essays with hope. In “Witch Lineage,” she invokes Maya Angelou’s complicated relationship with her mother and the potential for maternal redemption and forgiveness that Angelou describes in her memoir, Mom & Me & Mom. As a middle-aged mother, Lipson finds this “spacious portrayal . . . deeply comforting.” She provides her own comfort to readers in her refreshing determination to pivot away from the demeaning concept of “mommy brain” to something more enlivening. In her ideal formulation, mothering doesn’t have to turn the brain off but can be an activation of it. In “Thinkers Who Mother,” she writes that “Mothers will be hired, promoted—elected—for the maternal agility of their thinking.” Lipson posits that what it is truly like to be a mother is under-discussed and therefore often misunderstood. In these pages, she is doing her part to expose at least her version of it.

If there’s a climax to this collection, it pulses in the sentences of “Thinkers Who Mother.” This essay is a clarion call to bring “maternal thinking into the open where it can grow and flourish, transforming from private endeavor to collective force.” We see, with Lipson, that it’s not about just privately admitting to or even embracing our motherly impulses and imperfections—our screaming, our inattention, our overprotection, our anxieties, and indecisions—it’s a matter of laying them out on the table (or on the page) in the pursuit of grand-scale contemplation and radical normalization.