Profiles

“I wasn’t leaving my kids, and I knew I had to do something drastic to bring them with me.”

“But I knew that I had to be honest on the page, which meant that some people weren’t going to like me—both as the character in the book and the author.”

“I think it’s so important to document the aspects of motherhood that are less visible, the raw human stuff we don’t talk about, the guilt, the pain, the grieving.”

“I wanted readers to feel like they were inside these women’s heads so they’d have more compassion for each of them.”

“The real fire of wanting comes . . . when you’re determining who you’re going to be, what your purpose is in the world. Power, ambition, money, sex, identity—these things orbit the central concept of desire like planets in a solar system.”

An honest, heartfelt conversation between mother and daughter about writing together, family secrets, and the pursuit of truth and justice.

A frank conversation about systemic racism in the United States and its surprising similarity to narcissistic personality disorder.

“I hope that people who are struggling to become mothers will come away with more compassion for themselves—and that includes people who, for whatever reasons, never end up becoming mothers.”

“For a while, every essay I wrote, when I got to the really true thing at the end, it was love. Just love.”

A mother’s steadfast, tireless fight to discover the truth of her son’s sickness.

As a mother to two daughters, Keisner reflects on what it means to raise children in a culture of normalized violence against women.