Shayne Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account (Autofocus Books, 2025), contains interlocking essays that paint a faithful, personal, and at times, darkly funny narrative about experiencing a traumatic birth injury: a third-degree tear with additional complications. Leave details a deep reckoning with the self and the society in which we live. Pushing far beyond the boundaries of what one might assume is a “mom book,” it provides an unpretentious education about the failings of our healthcare system in America. Begun as notes on Terry’s phone that documented a parental leave gone awry, Leave examines capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and systems with a long history of devaluing women.
A prolific fiction writer, interviewer, and book reviewer, Terry’s foray into nonfiction combines the experimentation and urgency of her short fiction with the keen journalistic lens she’s used to grant readers access to other authors for years.
I spoke with Shayne Terry via video conferencing, where we talked about the nuances of memoir, writing about bodily trauma, and honoring different perspectives on the page.
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The Rumpus: The scope of this book is vast and more universal than one might expect on the surface. It’s not just a memoir for mothers or people navigating the postpartum experience, is it?
Shayne Terry: This book could easily be pigeonholed as a “mom book” because it involves a birth, but I think of it more as a book about injury and the search for healing—a book about the body. It’s about the cruelties of the US healthcare system and other commonplace American violence. It’s about birth—which every single one of us has experienced—and death—which every single one of us will experience.
I’ve been hesitant to call it a memoir. I feel more comfortable with “book-length essay,” but not everyone knows what I mean by that. “Memoir” doesn’t feel quite right because I’m not trying to say I went through this experience and I learned something from it and I changed. There’s no conventional character arc.
As for the scope of the book, when you’re writing a memoir or you’re writing anything that actually happened, you have to decide what timeframe the book covers, which in this case loosely spans the beginning of my parental leave from work through my first year postpartum. You have to choose a place to end the narrative because, of course, life keeps going. I found it helpful when determining that boundary to think of myself as different people: there’s the person these things happened to who wrote them down as they were happening, there’s the person who then edited them, turned it into a book, and made art out of it. Then there’s the person I am now. That’s three people. Likely even more. Things change, the way you feel about them changes, and the way you remember them changes.
Rumpus: The living, writing, and revising of Leave took years. What was your process? Didn’t the book begin as notes on your phone?
Terry: Yes. For a long time, I’ve used a notes app on my phone called Bear. I love it because you can organize your notes by hashtag. I use it for notes about everything, every part of my life. I have a general hashtag for thoughts I don’t want to lose: #thoughtlog. If I’m working on a particular project, a short story, or an essay, I’ll collect all of the notes about that project under a particular hashtag related to that project.
After my birth injury, I wound up stuck on my couch for a solid five weeks. It was so boring, so painful, and I was in shock about what had happened to my body. I also had time to fill because I couldn’t care for my baby. Lying there, I started capturing these thoughts on my phone: how I was feeling, trying to process things. I didn’t want to forget it because even as it was happening, I had a sense, thankfully, that it wasn’t always going to be this way. Fortunately, there was a writer part of me that was able to be like, “I’m going to use this for something later.”
Rumpus: When did you know you wanted these fragments and essays to become the larger project of this book?
Terry: Before all this happened, I had been taking notes on my phone for an essay: #momsandguns. I’d started thinking about the essay before I got pregnant. As I write in Leave, I was a bystander to an incident of gun violence, and it really changed the way I thought about the world and how I experienced it. I had been thinking about trying to have a baby, but I was working through some complicated feelings about it. How can I bring a child into a society that has so many guns?
Not long after I began to write in earnest about my birth injury, I realized these two separate collections of notes were a single project, so I merged them together. Then I had this essay that was thirty thousand words and I was having trouble figuring out how to revise it down, so I signed up for an essay revision class. There were exercises to figure out where to cut things, but by the end of the class, I realized I didn’t want to cut any of it. At some point I started calling it a “memoirette.” Terrible branding, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. After considering building it out into something much longer with my agent, something like seventy thousand words, and with more reportage for a trade publisher, my gut told me no. I couldn’t make it shorter or longer. It was what it was.
Rumpus: How much editing was there once the book was accepted for publication?
Terry: When Michael Wheaton at Autofocus Books bought it, I had to decide what else needed to be written or revised. I added a few new pieces and brought back a few I had cut. There are around seventy short pieces in the book and around forty more that didn’t make it in. I spent a year or so moving the pieces around like a puzzle.
After that, Michael had very few edits. I think we both understood that to add too much might disturb the quality the book has, of being an account written in real-time. This was 2023 and 2024, so I was out of the immediate postpartum headspace. I could have added more hindsight, more perspective, but it would have become a totally different book.
Rumpus: There are these wonderful moments, some instances of breaking the fourth wall, that I treasured, like the agent’s thoughts on the book, or the speaker and Daniel, the husband, discussing the speaker’s mother’s reaction to it. At what point in the revision process did you decide to give readers that kind of creative insight?
Terry: I started working those moments in as soon as I began getting feedback from first readers in 2021. Once I knew I wanted it to be a published project, one of my first steps was to talk to the people who play big roles in the story—my mom, Daniel, some close friends—and to let them read it if they wanted to. I didn’t have to do that, but I wanted to.
For me, the process of essay play involves a lot of making things visible that were invisible, which often means circling back to show what else was there. One natural way to do that, with this project, was to include other perspectives and other people’s memories. It’s a way of reminding the reader that this narrative, like all narratives, is constructed, and was constructed at a certain point in time.
So, I sent many of the people who are characters in the book an early draft and then tried to make space for their reactions, some of which wound up on the page. When I let my mom read it, she had some strong feelings about the way she was portrayed. In talking about our family, especially my grandma, I realized we had different perspectives. Neither of us is right nor wrong. I wanted that to come through in the book.
The subtext of many of our conversations was what it means to be a “good mom.” There’s a lot of pressure for mothering to look a certain way. I show in the book how many people in my life, both mothers and not, provided care for me when I needed it—my own mom included. And that care looked different with every person.
Rumpus: When you’re writing about real people in your life, it’s difficult to decide what—and who—to include and exclude. Daniel provides levity and great observations, but mostly from the periphery. How did you decide how much Daniel to include?
Terry: I felt so isolated at the time. The truth is, I don’t even remember him being there during those weeks and months. I don’t even remember talking to him. I needed to make it clear just how isolated I felt even from the people I was sharing space with, and who were caring for the baby and caring for me.
The first draft had zero Daniel and when my agent pointed that out, my initial response was, “This is my story.” I added Daniel into the book much later. It took me a long time to see how much he had done during that time, picking up the slack of the household and never complaining about it. I wanted to provide a glimpse into our relationship by including his commentary.
Rumpus: The love between the speaker and the sister is palpable, especially in the scene that takes place in the emergency room. How did you write with such humor and restraint?
Terry: My sister is an amazing person. She was someone I knew I wanted in the book, but I was also worried she wouldn’t want to be in it. Before she read it, I warned her that I had included the scene in the emergency room where she speaks in tongues in front of everybody when I’m in pain. I was nervous to share it, and she was nervous to read it, but when she read it, she came back with the most gracious, loving response. That’s how she is. She also said that she would handle that situation in the ER differently today, but she understands that this is what it means to write about our lives. We change.
My goal with the whole book, as I was writing it, was for it to be full of love. If there were places that were not full of love, I asked my early readers to tell me. When you’re dealing with hard, painful things, it’s easy to be hard. The harder thing is to be soft.
Rumpus: The search history sections, where you list out searches conducted during that time, were clever, sometimes deeply sad, and provided a great anchor throughout the book. What did these searches reveal to you?
Terry: It was an experience to go back two years later and actually look at my search history from that time. A medical search history, a search history about the body, is a form of desperation. Someone is trying to figure something out with urgency. That’s how it felt going back and seeing all the fruitless avenues I had gone down. Those are abridged search histories too, because of course the real search histories were so much longer, sometimes hundreds of queries a day. I wanted to capture the uncertainty, the sense of being lost.
Rumpus: How did you go about arranging Leave,narratively, chronologically, creatively?
Terry: Once I decided my notes had become a larger project, I moved them into Scrivener. I’m a huge Scrivener nerd, and I played with the arrangement incessantly. While I edited the pieces themselves very little, I kept moving them around and trying to find the flow. Many of them are linear, but I also wanted it to read as an interwoven narrative. I wanted it to be something that you can sit down and read in two hours, not leaving your chair, and that was beautiful to look at: an art object.
In my mind, the book has two parts even though I didn’t formally structure it that way. There’s the first half, which is navigating the immediate injury, and there’s the second half, which is moving around in the world again but still living with this injury nobody can see. With that, examining what happened. There’s more of the retrospective voice in the second half, whereas the first half is very much present tense.
Rumpus: I love that the cover isn’t meant to be palatable. These soft shades, but this precise, real imagery.
Terry: Yeah, nothing palatable there. I wanted readers to be able to self-select, to see it and be able to say yes or no right away.
Rumpus: A short section of the book that really stayed with me is one where the speaker is applying face oil that’s pricey and as such, usually savored, but now allows herself to do so with abandon. It’s a quick, intimate moment of self-care. This person, in the midst of terrible physical pain, is trying to hold fast to some semblance of their former self.
Terry: I had cut that at one point. It’s funny which sections felt almost too personal to include, because they’re not the ones you might think. I brought it back because it was really very true that I had to try to find ways to hold on to my life and remind myself that I was still alive, that I had a body and this body was going to keep changing. Allowing myself to use up this precious oil, to revel in its scent, was a way of grounding. “Reclaiming” is a good word for it. Reclaiming the body as part of the self. There were times when it felt easier to reject the body, to dissociate and pretend certain parts of my body didn’t exist.
Rumpus: A question posed to most everyone who writes a book about their life is whether the writing of it was cathartic or therapeutic. What do you think of that?
Terry: I’m actually mostly a fiction writer. I write in order to connect with other people and to feel less lonely, and this book is the first piece of nonfiction that I’ve ever published. But to answer the question, it was not therapeutic. Therapy has been therapeutic. Writing it was also not cathartic. I’ve had to figure that out for myself. I think I probably still haven’t had my catharsis.
Interestingly, writing this actually kept me locked in the sad parts longer than I might have been otherwise. Because in writing and revising, you have to keep revisiting it. I think if I had processed all this in therapy and closed that chapter, I might have had an easier time moving on. But instead of catharsis, it felt like taking something that happened and making art, art that will connect with people. When readers meet this story on the page, it becomes theirs. Perhaps it will be a conduit for someone else’s catharsis: a milestone in someone else’s healing.
Rumpus: I recently referred to you as the Sarah-Manguso-meets-David-Sedaris of postpartum storytelling, in part because your book defies easy categorization. What other books have helped or informed your writing process?
Terry: I’m a fanatic about all of Sigrid Nunez’s work, but Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag had particular relevance with this project. That book taught me that a memoir can be anything. It can be a slim meditation on one particular topic and doesn’t have to explain anything it doesn’t want to. Also, Heather Christle’s The Crying Book, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness were major touchstones for me. And then of course, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. She’s my go-to when it comes to writing about the body, telling it like it is, and calling a hard thing hard. My mother was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer while I was revising Leave, and so this book was helpful to me on many levels.
Finally, a novel: Marie-Helene Bertino’s Parakeet, which I read and reread while I was writing Leave. Sometimes it takes fiction to capture what something feels like, and this book for me perfectly depicts trauma, mother–daughter relationships, grief, injury, the body. Sometimes having a grandmother feels like a bird shitting all over your wedding dress.
Rumpus: As an “account,” Leave has so much to offer all of us about the experience of being human, of bodily autonomy, and loss. Now that it’s out in the world, who is Leave for?
Terry: I wrote it first and foremost for me, but I think of it as a grief book—for people who are trying to make sense of it. Before I had really experienced grief, I didn’t fully understand it when I encountered someone going through it. I couldn’t have. That’s also why I wanted the cover to be very in-your-face about the subject matter.
I think it’s also for people who love short books, like I do. People who enjoy the poetry of a very blunt sentence. People who have bodies that hurt, that don’t obey, that make living in the world challenging.
When I was first experiencing my specific birth injury, I couldn’t find accounts of the same thing online. So, I figured, the percentage of people that this particular birth injury happens to is fairly small, and the percentage of those people who are writers is that much smaller. How many of those people are actually willing to write about it? I realized it might only be me who could do this.
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Author photograph courtesy of Shane Terry
