Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays

USA Today Bestseller 'Sensitive, searingly intelligent, and beautifully written.' --Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma 'This is--for real--a masterwork, one I will return to over and over.' --Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year 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