154. Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: a Memoir in Essays featuring Nicole Graev Lipson

Nicole Graev Lipson joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about our culture’s fascination with reducing women to readymade templates and archetypes, performing fictional versions of ourselves, finding our way back to who we are, the essay as a place where writers can grapple with confusion, working sentence by sentence, finding the most precise microscopic truth, embracing our particularities, focusing on we’re enthralled with, what it means to be a woman today, writing about children, attention as a loving act, drawing from the mess, writing as our own form of protest, how writing can be a shame eraser, and her new book Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.

Also in this episode:

-finding your genre

-the architecture of the sentence

-finding community with other writers

Books mentioned this episode:

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

Any Person is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert

Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness

The Leaving Season by Kelly McMasters

“The Seam of the Snail” essay by Cynthia Ozick

NICOLE GRAEV LIPSON is the author of the memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Books, March 2025). Her writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays anthology, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her work has appeared publications such as The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and more. Born and raised in New York City, she lives outside of Boston with her husband and children.

Connect with Nicole:

Website: www.nicolegraevlipson.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nglipson

X: http://x.com/@NicoleGLipson

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.g.lipson

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Follow Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers