A Chat with Nicole Graev Lipson
Here’s what I know: as a classmate, Nicole Graev Lipson made grad school worthwhile; as a fellow writer, I will be forever impressed with her superlative focus, patience, and craft.
Who are we? Who are we in this moment? Who will we be? And how do we go about beginning to answer these questions? Nicole pursues the answers to these questions in her essays, her newsletter, and in her forthcoming book of non-fiction, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.
I spoke with Nicole over Zoom on the afternoon of November 13th with the goal of talking about an essay of hers that was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, “As They Like It.” What follows is an edited transcript.
Evan Fleischer: First things first/for the sake of ‘the record,’ why don’t you tell me about the origins or provenance of this piece?
Nicole Graev Lipson: The origins of this piece are the same of any essay I’ve written, I think, which is trying to understand the muddle of my own thinking and to try to sort through sensations, experiences, things that come at me so fast — which life tends to do to a person — that you might have disparate thoughts, fragmented thoughts … To me, though, writing an essay is about how do I assemble these different sensations, reactions, experiences I am having to try to understand them better — to at least come to a greater understanding or comfort with some ambivalence or ambiguity.
So, this particular essay — experiencing with my oldest child their journey towards understanding/stepping into their gender identity — was confusing to me for a number of reasons. As somebody who is cisgender, this is not something I’ve experienced firsthand, so, unlike a lot of journeys my children might go through — where I can look back and remember, where I can put myself easily in their shoes — my oldest’s gender non-conformity was something new to me as an experience. So the essay came from a place of trying to understand it more deeply. I will never walk exactly in my child’s shoes, but I’m still their parent. So how can I help guide them through this period when they are themselves a young adolescent? It might be a very different essay, if my child were 18 or 17, but a child in a period of transition that is always a period of transition — what is my role here, and how can I help guide them through it?
EF: In looking at these questions, then — i.e., ‘What is my role?’ the things raised by muddled thinking — these are the questions that move something from experience to writing? Because not every experience lends itself to writing.
NGL: For me, yes. I think there’s all kind of writing in the world, but when I sit down to write, it’s often because I don’t have a clear answer in my head. There’s something that is drawing my attention, perplexing me, confusing me, upsetting me, making me feel a little at odds with myself. And so I try to come to some sort of — not ‘clarity’ necessarily, but at least peace with the ambiguity and ambivalence.
I think we live in a world that shows us again and again how much people like certainty and clear cut answers and knowing what’s right or knowing what’s wrong or feeling like they’re on the side of the right and other people are on the side of the wrong. That’s a very human desire, right? We naturally want to categorize. We want to be able to understand what bucket to put people or experiences in.
I don’t think any of us are immune to that impulse, but one of the things that I love about the essay as a form is that it celebrates the ‘in-betweeness’ — or the space that isn’t either/or — that is ‘both and.’ I love my child. I support my child in whatever choices they make for themselves and I have questions about what a future as a gender non-conforming person might mean for them and I have worries about what their choices might lead to. These things can co-exist. I think there is not much space in our culture for that kind of ‘both and-ness.’ I think the hot take, the op-ed, even the personal essay as it’s transformed over recent years into 1,000 words or less doesn’t allow a lot of space to show ‘bothness.’ You have to pick a side and go with it, make an argument, and get in and out fast.
And so I love that the essay allows you to grapple with complexity. My inner contradictions might make me feel like ashamed or — ‘Is it okay to feel this way?’ Or to even state that something is an important value of mine. I often do this in my other essays, particularly with my feminist values.
[…]
Like — raising a son in a culture of — for lack of a better word — toxic masculinity. How can I help to protect him from some of these forces that are going to shape him or divide him from himself? He’s a particularly sensitive kid — to the point where, for about a year, he kept A Love Journal. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. The Love Journal contained meditations on love in all its forms.
EF (laughing): Jesus.
NGL: And this is when he was seven. And so there’s this beautiful thing in that. Part of me is — I really, really want to protect this. Then — one day — and I remember this from when my son was little — he was literally one year old and running around my family room in a diaper, teething drool on his chest.
And my mother is visiting, and we’re having some coffee on my couch and watching him do what an eighteen month year old does — like, banging on tables and this and that. And my Mom is like, ‘You know, he’s really macho.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? He’s one. He’s wearing a diaper. What are you talking about?’ And she was like, ‘No, he’s … he’s got a swagger. He’s got a thing about him.’
Part of me was literally rolling my eyes at my mom — ‘You’re just totally of a different generation’ — but part of me was also like, ‘I created that. I created that boy who just plows through without a care in the world.’
And so how can you hold these things to be true? I want to preserve the love journal-ness of my son — this beautiful tenderness — and I recognize how I have been infiltrated by certain ideas of what a boy or what a man should be — to a point where the life partner I chose for myself very much embodies these ideals. I mean, he’s a good man, but he very much embodies a lot of these ideals. So I love that. I love that — in an essay — I have space to explore the bothness of these things, because all humans have bothness of their own sort.
EF: I love that. So, in thinking about patience, complexity, ‘both and-ness,’ and protecting your children — particularly given that your form is the essay — I wonder if you have any thoughts on writing’s role in speaking with the future.
I’m partly saying this because I’m thinking of how some traditions can become folklore and how folklore is one way of unofficially speaking with the future. I’m saying this because of how some alternative libraries can serve as a place to perhaps temporarily store or safeguard history that doesn’t necessarily have common purchase on or with mainstream narratives.
And so — given that some of your work is involved in taking the present and trying to suss out the future for your kids — I’m wondering if there’s anything in the essay form itself that you think has a role in speaking with the future or if I’m conflating your subject matter with the form that you’ve chosen.
NGL: For me — and I don’t think this is for all essayists, necessarily, but I see the essay form as something of a hopeful form — that, in some way, even if I’m not arguing, even if my primary rhetorical mode isn’t persuasion or arguing for something that will make the world a better place, I think underlying the essays I write is a feeling of hope. ‘I’d really like for things to be otherwise. Some way.’
In that sense, writing for me is a gentle form of activism. It’s a comfortable mode of activism for me. I feel like — if I can have a conversation with the reader on the page by sharing my own experiences and why I have the hopes I do — that either I’m going to be speaking with someone who already shares these hopes with me (and, if that’s the case, I hope my writing moves them and makes them feel seen or gives them that sense of connection on the page) or maybe I’m talking to somebody who has never thought of these hopes or maybe even has opposite hopes but that — through my writing, through creating what I hope is a reasonable, measured person on the page — that I can help them see something a certain way; that I can get them thinking in a certain way.
So I guess that’s the way I see about writing for the future/into the future. It’s asking yourself, ‘What am I hoping for?’ and ‘How can this piece maybe move the needle one ten-trillionth of a centimeter?’
EF: So these past two answers set up the next question, which is — if that’s what you feel and think and know about the essay form, then how come I can’t pull you over to the fiction side?
NGL: So, as I’ve said, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think that … what I’m about to say is why some people do like fiction, but — to me — it has the opposite effect. I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider in life. Other people get something that I don’t get. A lot of writers can probably relate to that in some way. But I think what draws me to nonfiction is that it’s an analytical drive. I think that — if you read my writing — there is a lot of creativity in it; there’s a lot of scene-building, description … It’s definitely creative writing, but I think I just want to understand what’s happening around me because I’ve always felt distance from it or perplexed about it or a feeling that other people know what’s going on in the world. Or, like, how to be in the world.
And so — to me — adding a layer of fiction would be too much to grapple to with. It’s hard enough for me to wrap my hands around reality. I feel like — if I were to move into fiction — I would need to have a much stronger sense of reality.
(Both laugh.)
That to me is enough. Adding a layer of fiction is just … It just gives me a feeling of agoraphobia. I don’t know if I’m using that term right — if you can have a ‘feeling’ of agoraphobia or if you feel agoraphobic. I would have have to both grasp reality and what I think about and then add a layer of make believe on top of that.
EF: Personally speaking, I find that such a fascinating and welcomingly fascinating answer to hear, because — in no small part — I feel like someone in the mirror world hearing this. I quite often fall into a space where — to me — obvious things are obvious. Known things are known. Facts are facts, regardless of what the past twenty years of political discourse has done to us, so I always find myself falling victim to the gravitational pull of ‘What if?’ or ‘What about?’ because it feels like there is such staked claim in how things are the way they are. I don’t know. I love the fact that these two [responses] can sit side-by-side out there in the world.
I’ve been teaching a lot of writing classes, and people ask me about guiding rules, and I’ve just started to say that there is no one rule. Writers will consistently prove themselves exception to the rule and then — when you are aware of contrasting rules — it’s not a question of one overriding the other. It’s just, ‘How do you want to balance them?’
I don’t know. I feel grateful to hear something like this.
NGL: Even for writers who have been writing for a while — I don’t know about you, but every time I sit down to write an essay, I’m also reinventing how I do it, right? There’s certain things that might be a part of my process, but it’s not as if I could write down the rules to do what I’ve done. Each piece you write tells you how to do it as you do it.
EF: And each piece solves itself in a different way as well.
NGL: Right.
EF: Not to compare either of us to Martin Scorsese, but —
NGL: I always get that. People are always comparing —
EF: We always get that. They always come up to us in the street, like, “Evan, Nicole — if there’s one thing I have to say …”
NGL: Yeah.
EF: But the reason why I’m bringing him up is because whenever I hear actors talk about him, one common refrain I always hear — again and again — is how good he is at solving problems — and solving problems on the fly, and rapidly incorporating those solutions into the flow of the work, and I think that’s why I phrased it in terms of each piece wanting to be ‘solved’ in its own particular way as well because — I don’t know about you — but there’s always a point in half-consciously thinking about the craft in which you are guided just as much by the details inasmuch as anything else as well. People will ask for top-down answers to create things sometimes. And that’s sometimes a fun thing to provide — here’s my thesis, here’s my argument, etc, but it is surprising at how a piece can sometimes really boil down to — like — ‘Oh, this is how this person drinks this cup in this kind of light,’ you know what I mean?
NGL: Yeah. I did not make up this quote and I’m definitely going to butcher it, but I saw it somewhere and I wrote it down, but it’s — ‘Sometimes writing just feels like trying to fix problems I’ve just made for myself.’
EF: A thousand percent. A thousand percent.
NGL: That’s what it is. Like — what am I going to do today? If I have the morning blocked off to write, I’m going to make problems for myself on a page and then I’m going to have to figure out how to fix them. That’s the best description I’ve ever heard of the writing process.
EF: I’m still working on the novel, and one way I’ve been joking with people about it is — it’s like you’re building the Death Star, but you have to be nice about it. Because — again — you’re lining up all these pieces of research to ultimately create something that’s … aesthetically pleasing with something woven into the aesthetics that creates this elevating effect, but, no, you had to line up five different books to get that one sentence.
NGL: Totally.
[…]
EF: So, these questions and comments regarding research and craft and process sort of lead us back to your essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Now that it’s out in the world, is there anything at the craft level you’re still thinking about with this essay? Or have thoughts about this essay moved onto reception? Or is it, ‘What comes next?’
NGL: As you know — in the world of literary essays or short stories, there is often — or can be — a long lag time between the writing of something and the publishing of something. I also take a long time often to write one single essay. Between the first sentence I wrote and and the publication of that piece in VQR was probably 15-16 months. So I think that — at this point — having gone through many drafts and then worked with editors, the craft phase is definitely behind me, but it has been really wonderful, the response I’ve gotten to the essay.
I was unsure what kind of response I would get from the essay, because I think a lot of the dialogue around gender identity in our culture unfortunately has become such a third-rail topic and [we] can so easily misconstrue what people are saying or trying to say. I think it’s a delicate subject for a lot reasons, many of them good ones. I’ve been heartened by the response from readers who have written in to say that I spoke to them in some way. I think — at this point — the essay is very much in readers’ hands.
I think that — when a piece is written — it’s halfway done, and the other half is what readers bring with their own experience.
But it’s been nice to have that dialogue with mostly parents, who have written to express to me that they have gone through similar journeys with their own children. Some of the parents I’ve heard from have children in their 20’s. Some of the parents have children younger than mine. It’s been really wonderful. The essay has created this opportunity for me to connect with other parents who are raising children who are gender-non-conforming in some way.
EF: That certainly sounds affirming and reaffirming. Have these messages revealed anything else — an asterisk of a thought to this essay at all or … ?
NGL: The only message that I’ve received directly that wasn’t something along the lines of ‘This was helpful to me in X, Y, or Z way,’ it was definitely that — ‘Thank you for putting this essay out into the world,’ but the question the particular mother had was, ‘I went through similar feelings with my own child, but that was about 5, 6 years ago and I’m curious, have you considered you might come to see [this experience] differently?’ I read it a little bit along the lines of — I’m further along, I know a little bit more.’ And I responded. Any read who’s going to take the time to reach out kindly in some way is [wonderful.] But I can only speak from the experience that I’ve had at this point. There’s nowhere in that essay where I say that this is how I will feel forever. This is the point of view or perspective I will always write from. That is the challenge as memoirists. Anyone who writes from personal experience is — you can only write about the experience you’ve had so far. I could speculate. I could project into the future. But that wasn’t what the essay called for. But that goes for any essay that I write. But my book — Mothers and Other Characters — will be coming out in February of ‘25 —
EF: (muffled)
NGL: What’s that?
EF: Sorry. I was just saying ‘Buy the book!’
NGL: Yes! Please!
But everything in [the book] is a snapshot in time. This book is going to be bound and exist as an object ten years down the line from now. I shudder to think — ten years ago, what did I think or do that might be different than today? Are there things in that book that I might not stand by or feel differently about ten years from now? I’m sure of it. I’m human. I’m going to change. I’m going to grow.
The book is a human response to experiences that have happened in my life so far from where I’m writing now, as a late 40’s person, and that’s all it can be, you know? It’s very easy for people to read memoir as prescriptive — ‘This is the experience I’m talking about; therefore, everyone should feel this way,’ or, ‘This is the way things are,’ but the very reason I love memoir and personal essays as I write them is just putting the experience of thinking and grappling with something on the page versus, ‘This is the way things should be done.’ […] My hope is that my work gets read as an honest grappling on the page with some of the complexities and challenges of being human — which is to say, messy, contradictory, and confused, and also joyful and all of the things humans contain.
EF: And why don’t we call it there?