Join us for an author talk with authors Mary Catherine Starr and Nicole Graev Lipson. Register here.
About the authors:
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, a USA Today bestseller. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, the Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays anthology. She lives outside of Boston with her family.
In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives.
What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she's testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she's raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.
As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin's erotic story "The Storm" helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth's most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one's frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare's gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.
Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves--and the ones we're still becoming.
Mary Catherine Starr is an artist, graphic designer, and the author of Mama Needs a Minute! A Candid, Funny, All-Too-Relatable Comic Memoir about Surviving Motherhood (Chronicle Books). Her popular Instagram account @momlife_comics explores motherhood, marriage, and the double standards of parenting through funny, relatable, and sometimes maddening comics. She lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her husband, their two children, and her son’s large collection of plastic dinosaurs.
Packed with humor, warmth, and all-too-relatable anecdotes, this comic memoir explores the (often invisible) labor of modern motherhood that leaves so many moms feeling like they are losing themselves--and their minds! Whether you're navigating a hellish sleep regression, wiping sweet potato off the walls, seething with spousal resentment (deserved and undeserved), or simply hoping to pee without a toddler watching, this candid and irreverent account perfectly captures what every mom knows in her heart to be true: motherhood is @#$% hard (and also really amazing)!
Filled with Starr's signature wit, warmth, and observational humor, Mama Needs a Minute! tackles all the absurdities of mom life and will make you laugh, cry, and feel seen in a way only a true mom-friend can offer.