“There is no precise moment when my whole life stops being ahead of me,” writes Nicole Graev Lipson in “Shake Zone,” one of the strongest essays in her debut, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Prism, 2025). In the scene, she drives to a party, blasting Pearl Jam in her mother’s station wagon at the age of seventeen. She accelerates, screams the lyrics unapologetically, not yet concerned with the performances the world will require of her to be a “good” woman, a “good” mother.
The book is a moving memoir-in-essays detailing decades of Lipson’s experiences as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a woman. Through lyrical, compelling prose, she captures the chaos, complexities, joys, stigma, and challenges of girlhood, womanhood, and ultimately motherhood. The essays offer a unique blend of Lipson’s own memory with thoughtful analysis of the changing world around her and intentional references to outside source material. Every sentence has a purpose. Every anecdote is told with grace, clarity, and a kind of honesty you might expect from a conversation with a close friend willing to tell you she feels like a monster some days, a “MILF” others. Written with care, attention, and nuance, it’s an absorbing memoir of a life permanently altered by the burden and beauty of motherhood.
In addition to mining her own life, Lipson incorporates meticulous research largely informed by her years-long experience teaching literature. She draws upon lessons from a wide range of women—real and imagined—from Shakespeare’s plays to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening to Maya Angelou’s Mom & Me & Mom to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and even Mean Girls and Lady Gaga. In these moments, Lipson’s tone is calm, observant, intellectual—but never pretentious. The book’s title reflects a near-constant concern across the essays: the performance of gender, the literal act of becoming a woman, a wife, a mother. Women, Lipson asserts, are “shape shifters,” reinventing and readjusting ourselves to fit each new responsibility and role society imposes upon us.
Although I am not yet a parent myself, anyone who knows me knows I will read anything with the word “mother” in the title. I read Lipson’s book leading up to the day that marks two years since I last spoke to my own mother after deciding to end my tumultuous relationship with her at the age of thirty. “Going no contact” is what the numerous podcasts, TikToks, and think pieces called it last year, when estrangement from one’s parent(s) became more normalized. I stumbled across an article about it in The New Yorker one morning before work and then an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute called “Blocking Your Mom” on a road trip. I listened to songs about heartache and breakups, convinced they’d been written about my decision to estrange myself from my mother. Everything seemed to remind me of the magnitude of this choice and often left me in a dark, lonely place defined by shame and guilt. Reading Lipson’s book, on the other hand, offered a different kind of confrontation with the concept of “going no contact” with my mother.
“Why do so many of our mother–daughter myths speak of estrangement and rupture?” she asks, a question that stopped me in my tracks. In the essay, titled “Witch Lineage,” she goes to therapy in her early twenties, only to be coaxed in the initial session into revisiting a painful memory involving her mother from when she was eight. Not yet a mother, she is surprised that it feels good to talk about her own mother—to process how she saw her mom as a child and how that informs the way she sees her as an adult. In one of my favorite passages, Lipson writes, “We learn early that our mothers matter. Our fathers matter, too, of course. But the mattering of mothers is a different sort of mattering, primordial and amniotic. Most of us on earth awakened to life inside the body of our mother, and perhaps we never quite leave her.” While I occasionally felt that same sense of guilt about my relationship with my mother while reading Lipson, these thoughtful essays reminded me that physically distancing myself from her could never fully remove her from me, and maybe there’s a strange sort of comfort in that.
In many essays, Lipson tackles the relationship between selfhood and motherhood, concluding they “might be entirely incompatible callings.” Shortly after giving birth, a postpartum nurse enthusiastically calls her a “milk goddess,” a moment that gives way to one of the most profound discussions in the book about the value of women. In “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” she recounts the fallout of her mother’s affair and her parents’ subsequent divorce with a kind of empathy only afforded by time. Elsewhere, she reflects on the “invisible labor” a mother does each day, explores the professional and creative sacrifices made in service of caring for one’s children, considers how her upbringing has shaped her as a parent, and analyzes the role gender plays in how her children perceive the world and vice versa.
In “The New Pretty,” she reflects on seeing her mother get a nose job and, decades later, seeing her own four-year-old daughter paint her face with makeup only to ask, “Am I pretty now?” She analyzes coming of age amid the toxic diet culture of the ’90s and the consequences of a self-worth shaped by such sentiments as Kate Moss’s indelible slogan, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” While the pervasiveness of cosmetic surgery, Botox and other injections, and today’s beauty standards that encourage girls and women to look like Snapchat filters has received critical attention, Lipson’s contribution is authentic and relatable. She writes:
“Women fictionalize their bodies. We fuse ourselves with the inorganic: acrylic nails and porcelain veneers; hair extensions and lash extensions; color contacts and tanning sprays. We petrify our nerve endings with synthetic toxins, turning feeling flesh into cold, mute clay. We become, by degrees, living statues and cyborgs.”
She implicates herself in this cultural phenomenon, this performance of becoming a woman. She points to her laborious morning and nighttime skincare routines, her desire to be desired. The irony of my own participation in this performance is not lost on me, as I strategically overextend my fingers across my keyboard to prevent my glittering fake nails from chipping.
In some moments, I found Lipson’s lovely, perhaps even otherwise ordinary descriptions of her unconditional love for her children to be almost painful in light of my estrangement from my mother, in the same way that Lipson herself feels anger when she thinks about her mother’s affair: “The fierceness of my love for my children has filled me, at times, with rage, as I wonder in a new way how my mother could have betrayed us as she did.” These seemingly small instances in the book, like her simple yet striking description of her son’s qualities that only a mother would know—“the rub of a boy’s toes against his sheets, the wetness of his tears on my neck, his slack-jawed silence as he looks up at the August stars”—give me hope that someday I, too, will be capable of such earnest love and care. Rendering the pain of a past trauma in writing is difficult, but writing meaningfully about love is challenging in a different way. Lipson’s ability to do both with precision and compassion, often within the span of a single essay, will touch readers who are mothers, but also readers like me—and like all of us—who know what it is to have a mother. The contrast between the utter beauty and the profound ugliness of motherhood are among the many great strengths of this powerful collection.
