Review by Lara Lillibridge
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson is smart, sexy, highly relatable book. Lipson’s prose delves into what it means to be a woman, mother, and daughter and had me exclaiming, “Yes! Exactly!” audibly as I read. It’s the kind of intelligent read that sparks conversations—the perfect buddy read or book club pick.
Lipson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays anthology, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Alaska Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, Nylon, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Nicole holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Emerson College. Originally from New York City, she lives outside of Boston with her family. (Bio courtesy of her website.) So it is no wonder that her book dives deep into the topics that so define what it is to inhabit a female body in this moment.
Her opening chapter, “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me” sent me running to my kindle to refresh my memory of Kate Chopin’s stories—a rabbit hole I quite enjoyed. Lipson uses Chopin’s writing to meditate on her mother’s adultery and her parents’ divorce, and it is a thoughtful, nuanced reflection on infidelity and desire. She writes
I do know that my stance toward my mother’s decisions has shifted over the years. My parents’ story is a book I reread again and again, each time seeing things differently.
This describes my own feelings about my mother—fluid and shifting as I enter various stages of life. But far from merely cerebral, Lipson weaves personal passages of her marriage, motherhood, return to school, and brush with temptation among these philosophical musings.
In “The New Pretty” Lipson discusses cosmetic surgery, body image struggles, and mothering girls. And while I found myself giving a hardy, “Hell, yeah!” to statements like,
“Beauty, I’ve come to believe, isn’t a physical ideal. It’s the promise of power, for which we cede what power we already have.” I also appreciated the thoughtful reflection on the current trend of ignoring beauty:
With my girls especially, I’ve been careful, wanting them to grow up believing it’s who they are that’s important, not what they look like. But I’m starting to believe that we should name our daughters’ beauty—that we, in fact, must name and honor their beauty if we’re to have any hope of protecting it from perversion.
As a child with very feminist parents who disdained conventional beauty standards, I grew up not feeling pretty, and not understanding the power and cost of beauty, so I really appreciated the thorough dissection of the topic.
Lipson goes on to use literature as an entry point for many of the essays, such as a discussion of gender and Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” and the complicated and contradictory feelings of mothering a nonbinary child. “Very Nice Blastocysts,” ruminates on fertility and the moral conundrums science gives us along with the gift of conception—from frozen embryos to abortion—in conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry. Thoreau, Whitman, and classic literary heroes jumble together with reflections of mothering and being a woman, writing:
Only after I’ve had children does it hit me that the solitary seekers who forged the pathways of my imagination, shaping my understanding of a life well lived, of human destiny, of my destiny, were all men. Only after I’ve had children do I realize that motherhood and selfhood might be entirely incompatible callings.
This is what makes the books so exciting—her ability to capture what it means to be a mother in this moment, and how it coexists or fights against the lessons we have been taught. Books, children, friendship, competition, desire. Everything I feel and think about as a woman and mother in 2025, but taken to a deeper level. This is a book I will keep coming back to, a book that I long to talk to friends about, that I will gift to other women.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson
Chronicle Prism, 2025, 248 Pages, 17.95 [paper],
ISBN: 9781797228563
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning; Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent; and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home. Lara is core faculty for Literary Cleveland and holds an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.