Unwinding the Spiral: A Conversation with Lauren W. Westerfield

Woman House: Essays and Assemblages

by Lauren W. Westerfield

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026; 224 pp; $24.95

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Lauren W. Westerfield’s newest collection of lyric essays, Woman House: Essays and Assemblages, reexamines trauma from the past—stories she thought she knew—forcing her to question her understanding of her mother, herself, and their connection to each other. Westerfield crafted the essays after her parents’ separation, when she became her mother’s caretaker due to a series of illnesses and mental health challenges. With an artist’s eye, Westerfield uses a spiral, fragmented timeline to capture the monotony and isolation of caretaking, her relationship with her artist mother, and how trauma, sex, feminism, and fear have impacted them.

Woman House is the winner of the 2025 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Westerfield’s first collection of essays, Depth Control, was published in 2025. Her earlier essays and poetry have appeared in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter. She is an English professor at Washington State University, where she also serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review. 

M.D. McIntyre (MDM): What does “essays and assemblages” mean to you?

Lauren Westerfield (LW): My style as an essayist bends towards the braided or fragmented approach. My first book, Depth Control, was much more experimental and plays with form. For Woman House, I found myself wanting to write essays, but also wanted to include shorter pieces that are more formally inventive, like the interludes—imagistic or experimental writings that fit between the longer, more traditional essays. “Assemblages” can also refer to the art discussed in the book. And some essays were overtly acts of assemblage; for example, “Pentimento” is an essay that jumps all over the place. While writing and revising, I cut up the sections and spread them all over the table to assemble them.

MDM: Your book explores the universal call of every child—the need to understand our mothers. The desire to know who they are, who they were, and what formed them. When did you first feel that question calling you? 

LW: I’ve been trying to figure out the question “who was my mom before me?” for most of my conscious life. I’m fascinated by it. It seemed important to my mom to be a person independent of motherhood. Those two things—personhood and motherhood—held a tense relationship within her. I developed a protective instinct for her—wanting to be the one person to see my mom for who she was and wanted to be. That desire to protect her became clearer to me when I was older and working on the book. It also brings up questions of co-dependency, and how I am complicit in that dynamic with her. I wonder: what is really genuinely caring and supportive of a parent, and what is enabling or unhelpful? Those are complexities I live with every day—not ideas neatly wrapped up in the book. Exploring these questions is something that became clearer to me as I wrote through them, in both a universal and a personal way.

MDM: Were you ever afraid to dissect your relationship with your mother in your writing?

LW: It’s challenging to write about parents, our retroactive understanding of our childhoods, and our own emotional baggage. It is easier when it’s purely personal as opposed to the publishing space, where it becomes more difficult to own that material. 

I had asked my mother’s permission to write about her ECT (electroconvulsion therapy) treatments. I also wrote about it while it was happening. I wrote in the mornings and in the evenings after the treatments. The immediacy of that process helped me get the words on the page. But I am also, again, protective of my mom. It is hard not to be, especially with a mental health treatment that has a lot of stigma and controversy around it. I’m wary of what people might think. What if I write something that happened, but she can’t remember it because of the side effects? There are ethical considerations as a writer as well. At the same time, I’ve been an editor and author for some time, and I intend to publish most of what I’m writing once I begin writing an essay or other project with intentionality, so this tension is one I’ve grown accustomed to. But that doesn’t make it any easier to really “go there” when I am excavating an experience.

MDM: You’ve written about your mother’s experience previously. How did you decide what to include and what to leave out for this book?

LW: In the essay “Twenty-Seven,” I describe when I first wrote about my mother’s rape. The essay from 2013 was overwrought, but I was overwrought at that time. I’ve heard my mother talk about that experience, and related experiences, and the ripple effects they had on her life in other ways. I spent more time with her as a caretaker, a daughter, and a neighbor once we lived closer together. The story changed as I learned more.

She would talk about how much she loved her apartment that she had lived in when she was younger, where she lived when the rape happened. We would look at the street view together, and it was clear that she felt nostalgia for this place. The scenes of trauma were also part of a happy time, and that contradiction lent itself to telling and retelling the story. I was trying to contextualize how the story changed while also still trying to capture the immediacy of her telling me about it for the first time.

MDM: You changed, she changed, and the story changed. That is useful from a craft perspective because as we revisit major life events, our perspective changes over time.

LW: Keeping older material relevant is an editing and revision challenge. Sometimes, something you wrote a while back can feel like the wind went out of the sails. In that essay, it was important to keep some of the original impact because that revelation is, in part, what the book is about.

MDM: You gave the isolation of caring for a family member a voice in this work. How did that manifest for you personally?

LW: With my parents’ separation, the caretaking that would fall to my mother’s partner wasn’t an option. My father is very financially supportive and caring, but the basic and fundamental fact is that I’m an only child. I’m her emergency contact and it was—and sometimes still is—very lonely. My husband is also an only child and we share that experience. I have someone to talk to about caretaking, which is wonderful. Not that long ago, my mom and my husband were sick at the same time. I thought about the choice to bring more people into my life—becoming a parent, a partner, or having a chosen family—and the caretaking responsibilities and the joy that comes with that. You can reduce the isolation, but you can also up the ante in terms of what you might need to do to care for the ones you love.

MDM: The imagery in Woman House is paired with feminist artist Louise Bourgeois’s work, especially her spirals. How has her work influenced your writing style and structure?

LW: I’m still uncovering why, and how, and where my fascination with Bourgeois comes from. I feel connected with Louise: a woman raised in her father’s image, with a deep love for her mother, who has an intellectual bent toward rationalism and science, but also art and maternal influence, and focused on making her way. Her story resonated with me. The spirals and figures of women in her “Femme Maison” series contain a lot of repetition of shapes and body parts. The iterative nature of her work is something I’m interested in as an essayist. I have come to see the reoccurring significance of things in my own life and writing and scholarship. I really value when I can re-see something and revisit my understanding of its role in my own life. There is a push for meaning in that examination. Louise’s interest in analysis and self-understanding, as well as in finding repeating patterns to make sense of her life, was something she brought into her art. I am drawn to that. I can relate to that.

In writing Woman House, I was driven to unpack my un-feminist upbringing. I see something similar in Bourgeois’ work. In my writing, I am trying to reconcile my upbringing with my adult feminist consciousness. The essayist Arianne Zwartjes uses the term “situatedness,” and I love that. I’m trying to understand where I, as a writer and thinker, stand in relation to my privilege and social, economic, and political context. It is what draws me to essays, and it is also what I most love to read, regardless of genre.

MDM:  Besides work about Bourgeois, what other books were influential or inspiring to your essays in Woman House? 

LW: For the perspective and time shifts, Annie Ernaux was really useful, especially her work, A Woman’s Story and A Girl’s Story. One of my favorite books to teach and reread is Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s book-length essay, Borealis. It moves around in time in a way that feels very organic, and also confounding. It takes a lot of work to pin down why it is organic, but Sloan is adept with associative leaps, repeating and shaping, crafting something that scatters first and then gels together. Other influential texts were Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno, The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit, and Girlhood by Melissa Febos.

MDM: You have written poetry as well as formal and lyric essays. What is next for you?

LW: I’m in the middle of writing a few essays riffing on ideas from Woman House, including a piece about Jane Austen adaptations for film and television. I’m also thinking about a third book project about my hometown in Northern California. I’m interested in looking into how where we grow up influences our identity and exploring how the specific history of my peculiar hometown has stayed with me.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.