Opinion | The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering

I’ve tried in this book to trace the course of that change. I’ve tried to find out what mothering plus creativity looks like, not just in the first few years, but as part of a life story. What does it mean to create, not alone in “a room of one’s own,” but in a shared space? What kinds of work have come out of that space? What is the shape of a cre

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The book also signals a way out of a prominent contemporary narrative in which women—usually white women—are portrayed as intellectually and creatively stifled by childbearing, and motherhood is characterized as an inherent threat to individual possibility. This narrative isn’t wrong; during the past nineteen months, I’ve had less time to work, hav... See more

As a memoir writer, it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly? Not what am I meant to feel, or what is it politic to feel, or what is it convenient to feel. As Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, the greatest difficulty in writing is “knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to fee

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