REVIEW: Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson

Reviewed by Vicki Mayk

Some of the best nonfiction writing reveals the universal while telling a personal story. In Nicole Graev Lipson’s remarkable debut collection, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir In Essays (Chronicle Prism, 2025), the writer brilliantly mines stories from her own life to reveal the truth, pain, and beauty that mark the experiences all women share in their roles as wives/partners, lovers, mothers, and friends.

Each of the 12 essays is a jewel, skillfully written with intelligence and candor. With so many fine choices, it is difficult to pick a favorite among them. Using a bright orange highlighter to mark favorite passages as I made my way through the book, its pages were soon illuminated with many neon streaks. Reading with my writer’s eye, I found the book was a masterclass in the art of the essay.

It is especially noteworthy to see how flawlessly Lipson braids the various narrative threads in her work. A hallmark in several of these essays is her use of favorite literary works as ways to illuminate her own life. In the book’s opening essay, “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” the writer revisits Chopin’s The Awakening, a landmark work of feminist literature. She draws parallels between a story in Chopin’s book about marital infidelity and her mother’s extramarital affair, which upended Lipson’s family of origin.

Lipson had first read Chopin’s book in her freshman year of college — the same year her mother’s infidelity came to light. A third thread about the adult Lipson’s attraction to another student in a writing workshop provides a revelatory moment about her mother’s affair that comes to her later during her daughter’s birthday party: I’m startled by how easy it would abe to move my hand one inch farther, setting everything that matters to me on fire.

Perhaps the essay I most admire is “As They Like It.” It stands out, not just for Lipson’s engaging prose but for the insight and sensitivity she brings to a topic now part of societal debate. The author leverages a literary classic — Shakespeare’s As You Like It–to examine gender identification and gender roles. Rosalind, the play’s leading character, spends most of the play masquerading as a boy. The essay is organized into Acts, like a play. It begins with Lipson’s recollection of enthusiastically teaching As You Like It in a high school English class, writing, “But my true goal — the goal that keeps me awake at night tinkering with lesson plans, the goal that makes me feel the work I’ve chosen matters — is to use the play to convince these future custodians of the world they must all be feminists.”

The surprising reaction of one of her male students, whose inability to complete a homework assignment to write as a member of the opposite sex reveals his own struggles with gender identity, allows Lipson to segue into writing about her oldest daughter’s early identification as nonbinary. The essay moves seamlessly in and out of considerations of Shakespeare’s heroine, revisiting popular culture stories of girls masquerading as men (think Disney’s Mulan), and recollections of her own questioning as her daughter often eschews all things traditionally feminine. Lipson thoughtfully and respectfully considers the changing nature of gender, offering no pat conclusions. Instead, she muses, “Maybe, in this way, my story isn’t a new story, though its details are particular to our era. Maybe it’s the story shared by parents everywhere, for time immemorial, who’ve had to accept, as their children grow, that they are not them.”

The collection includes pieces exploring women’s body image and beauty standards, female friendship, and the acceptance of aging that transforms us into what Lipson calls “the wise woman, the crone, the great mother.” Each is a beautifully written reflection on topics that women face in their lifetimes. The themes of parenting and what it means to be a mother surface again and again, even among essays primarily focused on other subjects.  Although my years of parenting young children are long past, the pieces centered on motherhood still found me saying, “Yes!” as I read of Lipson’s experiences, so relatable to my own. Like the rest of her work, these are not clichéd examinations of the maternal role, but fresh insights about the challenges found in being a mother.

Of the essays focused on motherhood, perhaps my favorite is “A Place, Or A State of Affairs,” which examines what Lipson dubs “maternal solitude deficit.” In a twist on Virginia Woolf’s admonition that women need a room of their own, Lipson takes it a step further, arguing that mothers need to spend time alone. She ruminates that alone time is so rare, mothers tend to snatch it in whatever way they can: “I’ve found solace as a mother in the soft narcotic light of a dentist’s chair and in a curtained corner of Beth Israel Hospital’s emergency room after smacking my head—while racing to clean up after a slime-making project—on the underside of our granite counter.” Her greatest insight about the need for alone time comes from her youngest daughter, who asks, “Sometimes I like to play alone, Mama….Can I play alone?” This moment prompts another of Lipson’s unforgettable lines: “It’s hard to give to your children what you have not been able to give to yourself. This, too, dawns on me.”

It was a line I came back to as I finished this book. Although as women we may not always be able to give ourselves the solitude, time, and care we need, we can give ourselves the gift of a fine writer’s words, whispering in our ear the kind of stories we need to hear. Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is such a gift.