Episode 19: Nicole Graev Lipson
On the Attention, Intention, and Complexity of Mothers
Nicole Graev Lipson’s Five Books:
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
I and Thou by Martin Buber
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich
Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Yehuda Kurtzer (host of Identity/Crisis), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
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.
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves—and the ones we’re still becoming.
Nicole Graev Lipson’s writing 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 numerous publications including the LA Review of Books, The Millions, Nylon, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe.
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.
In our conversation, we’ll talk about how Nicole reconnected with Jewish tradition (beginning with a book!), the vital importance of bringing more complexity to the experience of motherhood, and Nicole’s tender and nuanced approach to parenting a child who doesn’t fit into gender norms.
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Transcript: Nicole Graev Lipson on the Attention, Intention, and Complexity of Mothers
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Nicole Graev Lipson about her new book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays.Nicole Graev Lipson:
What drew me to the page was this feeling that I had since becoming a mother, that I had stepped into a fictional template of motherhood. I was myself and not myself. I was striving to meet this kind of platonic ideal of Mother with a capital M.Nicole's work has appeared in numerous publications, including The LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among many others. Her writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for the Best American Essays Anthology, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award.
In this episode, we got to talk about how reading The Chosen by Chaim Potok inspired her to reconnect with her own heritage.
None of the books that I read in English class featured Jewish characters until The Chosen was on a summer reading list. And it was the first book that I read where Jewish characters were front and center and this sort of Jewish world. It was almost like a mirror held up to an identity that I had lost, that identity that my family had let disintegrate or fade.
We also talk about the work of repair in our relationships and in our world, about cultural beauty standards, and about the experience of parenting a child who doesn't fit gender norms.
As I started to observe my oldest begin to migrate in middle school from the identity of a girl toward the identity of a boy, I was trying to process that as a parent, as a mother. And really looking for narratives that grappled with what does it mean to mother a child during these explorations. You know, how should I orient myself to my child? What is my role in this journey?
All that and more coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Nicole. I'm delighted to talk to you about Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Thanks for being here.
I'm so happy to be here, Tali. Thank you for having me.
So first, I guess if you could just tell us a little overview of your book and how it came to be. I know that many of these essays had been previously published, so curious how you knew it was a book and at what point you figured that out.
Sure. So I started writing the first of these essays when my children were quite young. I have three children and they were probably around three, five and eight when I started writing this book. And the impetus, what drew me to the page was this feeling that I had since becoming a mother that I had stepped into sort of a fictional template of motherhood. I was often haunted by this feeling that I was myself and not myself, that so much of my daily experience felt like I was striving to meet this kind of platonic ideal of Mother with a capital M.
And I started to write these pieces, the first of them, almost out of desperation. Sometimes I think of motherhood as giving me the gift of desperation in terms of my creative growth. While I had always written and writing has been a huge part of my being for my entire life, it always was on the back shelf and it was when I became a mother and really was drawn to investigating this feeling that I just described that writing took center stage in my life. So the first few essays, I really wrote intending them to be standalone essays that I would publish individually. And after I'd written about three of them, I began to realize that they were all in their own way, circling around the same central question, which is, where does truth and fiction begin when one is a woman? And what are the ways that the stories that we inherit from generations before us, from our culture, how do they sort of seep into us so that it's difficult at some point to really discern what parts of us are quote unquote “true” and what parts are fictional.
I thought it was just so smart and nuanced and thought-provoking, and the writing just had me folding over every page, highlighting, underlining. It's the book that I keep telling friends, like, have you read this yet? And passing along. So thank you.
That’s so nice to hear. Thank you.
Book One: A Jewish Book from Childhood — The Chosen by Chaim Potok.
So The Chosen is a novel and it takes place at the end of World War II in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It has two protagonists, really, two boys, one named Reuven and one named Danny. And they sort of are brought together by accident during a baseball game where Danny accidentally injures the eye of Reuven during this baseball game. And what starts as sort of a relationship of antagonism, being face-to-face in this baseball game, over the course of the novel turns into a deep, deep friendship. And Danny comes from a Hasidic family and Ruben comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. And so there's a lot of learning from one another and bridging differences and realizing in what ways their lives are similar and also what they have to learn from one another.
Yeah, I love that you chose this book. Before we get into the book too much, though, I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about your family's Jewish story. I guess you touch on it a little bit in the book, your great grandparents and all of that.
Yeah, and that's actually really related to why I love The Chosen. So I think the two dovetail really nicely together. All of my grandparents or great-grandparents came from Eastern Europe, Ukraine. My grandmother was born in Ukraine. And the story that I relate in the book of her family, her parents bringing her to a neighboring village one day when she was an infant, to visit family in a neighboring village. And when they returned, there had been destruction in their own village because of a pogrom. And they came home to find their family dead, their extended family dead. So really a terrible, terrible story of what forced them to leave Ukraine and come to the US.
The biggest impact on me of my grandparents' life after they came to America is that I think they were really of a generation of assimilation and very much let go of a lot of the traditions, a lot of the beliefs that they had had. And that really impacted my own upbringing. So we're reform Jews. I grew up in New York City. I would say that we thought of ourselves as culturally Jewish and went to synagogue on the high holidays. And I attended Hebrew school in a very minimal and sort of ad hoc fashion. So it was not a priority for my parents. The school that I went to growing up, I was one of five Jewish students in my grade.
And I didn't know what I was missing at that point, but as I grew older, Judaism is something that it's been an intentional choice for me to raise my family much more observant than I was raised and to almost reclaim that identity that had been surrendered in a lot of ways by my grandparents and my parents.
And The Chosen actually was a part of that for me. Going to a secular school growing up, it had no formal religious underpinning, but everything was sort of secularly Christian there, right? Like we did the Christmas pageants. That was the sort of soup in which I grew up. And so I never saw Jewish identity reflected in my educational life. None of the books that I read in English class featured Jewish characters. I didn't see that sort of lost identity of mine reflected back to me in any way until The Chosen was on a summer reading list. So sort of like an optional, you know, here are some books that you can read. And I think I was curious from the description to read it. And it was the first book that I read where Jewish characters were front and center and this sort of Jewish world. And I used to teach high school English and we often talked about books as being a window or a mirror for students. A mirror being a book that you read and you see your own identity validated and reflected back to you and a book that's a window being a book that introduces you to a culture or a sensibility or a perspective that you don't have from your own life experience, I felt as if The Chosen should be a mirror, right? But that it was almost like a mirror held up to an identity that I had lost, an identity that my family had let disintegrate or fade. And it really sparked my curiosity. And I would say that it was the beginning of my sort of more intentional yearning to discover Judaism for myself in a deeper way.
Wow. And what did that look like for you? If that was the beginning, what did you continue on doing?
So in college, I took a number of Jewish studies courses. And I took literally the Intro to Judaism course and learned so much, right? And it's funny because there were so many Jewish students in that course who were taking it as an easy A because they knew all of this stuff. And for me, I was just soaking it all up because a lot of it was new to me.
And an experience I’ll never forget, too, was — we didn’t celebrate Shabbat growing up, and I was dating somebody my freshman year in college who very horrifically and tragically lost his brother. And he went home for a while, understandably, and took a leave of absence from school. And when he came back — his family was Jewish — when he came back, he asked me to start going to Shabbat services with him at Hillel at Cornell, which is where we went to school. And I experienced firsthand, you know, how that community, that ritual was a source of comfort. And it felt like a great privilege, an honor to be able to do that for him and with him, to accompany him there.
And I married a Jewish man after college and both of us made a very intentional decision to put our Judaism at the center of our lives as we were raising children and really working to help them build a Jewish identity. So I feel like I've built my Jewish identity along with my children, which is actually really nice.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — I and Thou by Martin Buber.
Martin Buber wrote this book in the 1920s. Jewish Austrian philosopher, I guess you would call him. The basic premise of I and Thou, Buber divides the relationships that a human being can have with any entity into two different categories. And one of these relationships he describes as an I-it relationship and the other he describes as an I-thou relationship. And he argues that most of our relationships are I-it relationships and an I-it relationship is where we see the object or the person before us almost as a means to an end, right? Like you can look at a tree for instance, and you can say, that's a good tree for climbing, right? I'm going to use that tree to climb. Or you can say, this is a really nice tree for my landscaping, and it will give me a nice, beautiful backyard. So this is an I-it relationship, because we're thinking of the tree as an object. And in applying that to humans, it's a very transactional relationship. So your relationship with your Uber driver, if you get into the car and you shut the door and you put on your headphones and your driver drives you to your destination and you get out of the car and thank him, that's an I-it relationship, right? He's serving a purpose in your life. Whereas an I-thou relationship is one where we enter into a mutual dynamic with these objects of the world or with people, a deeper communion between two people than the sort of, how can you be of use to me attitude.
And Buber really makes a case that it's in that relationship, it's in the I-thou relationship that God exists, that meaning emerges, that the spiritual exists. And I just have found this framework so helpful and instructive and grounding in so many ways since I discovered this book in my 20s. I think about it all the time. I use it often to check myself because there are so many ways in which our modern world encourages us to move through it relating to people and objects in I-it ways. You know, I think the I-it sensibility is what has allowed the terrible environmental destruction that we see in our world where the landscape and nature has become just something to use for our own benefit. The objectification of other human beings and the ways that that has led to terrible oppression throughout human history is a result of the I-it relationship. Martin Luther King Jr. cites Buber in his beautiful, beautiful 1963 essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he argues that slavery was due to the I-it foundation of human relationships, and it's only by thinking of other humans as an “it”, rather than a fully human being, that we can perpetrate things like slavery.
I mean, so much of your writing and the impetus behind so many of the essays is about bringing complexity to the fore of our relationships. And you write about motherhood being reduced to a binary of either-or in so many times and bringing back complexity. So I wonder if you could just explore that a little bit more for us.
Sure. Well, I guess I'll start by saying that I am drawn to the page and compelled to write nearly always by confusion, by something that is perplexing me or that I feel of two minds about. And in writing about motherhood in particular, I think that there are so many aspects of a woman's experience as a mother that are pretty...common. And I say this based not on, you know, specific scientific research, but just conversations I've had with every single mother that I know about our longing for escape at times, our need for solitude, our feelings of rage at times, our frustrations, all of these things that don't fit into the model of a quote unquote “good mother.” And so we are sort of pushed to conceal these feelings, to sublimate them, to think of them as shameful. I think that one of the tools of patriarchy is to turn what are actually really quite common feelings into a source of shame. So I was very much in these essays trying to capture the both-and-ness of being a mother.
And I mean, I think my essay, “A Place or a State of Affairs,” which is very much about my bone-deep need for solitude as an introverted person, and what does that look like when you're a mother and a mother of multiple children as I am, how to reconcile these two longings, my longing to be there for my children, to be present, as I was just describing. I want to be present for my children. I want to reflect them back to themselves. But sometimes I just want to escape and have the space for reflection and quiet. I think that so many of our narratives about motherhood are very either or. The Mother's Day version of motherhood where, you know, the mother is the self-sacrificing, you know, saintly figure who is beloved for her selflessness and her giving and, you know, the sort of bouquet of flowers version of motherhood. And then I think there's the sort of motherhood is all awful, mothers are pawns in the hands of patriarchy.
And both of these things are true. Right? I wanted to really think about and describe how a single moment as a mother can contain both of these feelings, a single hour, a single day. It's not solitude, for instance, that I want all the time. It's not that I want to escape from my children forevermore. It's the balance, right? It's having that sacred space alone time and the togetherness and the presence. And these two work in tandem to make me feel whole as a woman. I'd like to think that my children seeing their mother have a life beyond them, as well as a life with them, also helps them feel whole and also helps them envision a future for themselves. Or maybe if they ever are a parent, they also can access the same variety of experiences. So I think the argument that my book makes, if there is an argument, it's simply that women are complex, multilayered, multidimensional, internally contradictory human beings. That shouldn't sound groundbreaking in the 21st century, but in many ways, claiming that is still radical.
Book Three, A Book That Changed Your Worldview: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich.
Of Woman Born is a monumental book written in 1976 by Adrienne Rich and its subtitle is Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I didn't come to this book until I had actually started writing the essays that became Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. And I think the story of how I came to this book actually might help demonstrate why I feel it's such an important book. So I was in a writing workshop and I was writing an essay in it that didn't, it's not in my book, but it was an essay exploring my aversion, when my children were younger, to playing with them. So I could read to my children, I could take them to museums, I could go on walks with them. But it was really, really hard for me to play with them, to put myself in their imaginative worlds or to get down on the floor with them and play Legos. I just found it really, really hard. And I felt ashamed of this. I felt guilty about it. I felt to be a good mother would mean giving myself over more to their play. I felt like, I don't know, like a shrew in a way. Like, who doesn't like to play? What's wrong with me? Why am I no fun? So I was exploring this and the workshop teacher who was a man in his 70s, very wise, experienced human and writing teacher gave me some feedback. And one of the things that he said in his feedback was, I think it would be really helpful for you as you explore these topics and you explore maternal guilt and these feelings to read Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born.
And it was a life-changing recommendation because what she does in this book is put into context the ways that motherhood is both a private, deeply meaningful, worthy, spiritual and intellectual endeavor, right? All of the, the I-vow-ness that motherhood allows us in relation to our children, but that it has been seized upon in a patriarchal context and made into an institution. And the institution of motherhood has been used to control women. That distinction for me made me realize, you know, just to use this essay as an example, that I had been looking inward at my own failings, right? And that's something we very much have been trained to do, I think, as women and as mothers, when really what needs to be looked at with that level of scrutiny are the systems around us that have held up the nuclear family as the be-all and end-all of family life, where the nuclear family is a really pretty recent invention and one that has left a single primary caregiver, usually the mother, in charge of her children.
And that is a lot to ask of one human being to not simply be the person who is caring for the bodies of their children, but then beyond that to be their playmates, right? And that wasn't always the case in communities where they're raised by aunties and by cousins and families are interacting and people live near extended family. Things look quite different. But in the sort of isolated nuclear families that we live now, there are impossible expectations on the primary caregiver to be everything for their child.
I think that Of Woman Born, it's a wonderful book for anyone to read, whether you're a mother yourself or not. Motherhood is often treated as a niche genre. You know, sort of books about motherhood are often seen as being of interest only to mothers. I find that really curious because in some ways motherhood is one of the most universal human experiences there is. We all come in touch with motherhood in some really deep way in our lives.
Yeah, I was going to ask you, you write about your own mother. You write with a lot of care and you give her grace. You know, you write about how she had an affair when you were a teenager, your parents get divorced, and you write about understanding her outside of just her in relation to you. And you talk about right now, you know, the dominant therapeutic approach, which is everything that's bad in our lives is because of our mothers. So if you could just speak to that a little bit.
Sure. So nothing has made me more compassionate, forgiving, understanding of my mother, like becoming a mother myself. I think it is so easy as children to see our mothers is in the I-it relationship, right? That this woman is sort of the center of your universe, but in a very practical role-filling way. And when I became a mother, I almost immediately, I have a scene in the book where my mom drove to Boston from Connecticut when I went into labor with my first child. And we had a okay relationship at that point. It was a little distant. I almost had felt after I got married that the ways that I needed her in that I-it way had been supplanted by my husband. And she drove when I went into labor to be with me and was there through the entire laboring process and stayed with us afterwards to help with the baby. And there was just something in that time that tied us together in this really elemental way where I began to see my daughterhood in this new way. I began to think of us as three females, I mean, my oldest child was born a girl, and these three generations kind of tied together by our daughterhood, our motherhood. And I think that that brought about a shift in the way that I started to think of her. And I think as I grappled through my own disappointments in myself, right, like I remember when my daughter was born looking at her absolutely perfect body and thinking, how can anyone ever yell at their child? I will never do that, right? And spoiler alert, like I certainly have yelled at my child as she grew. And I think falling short of my own hopes for myself made me a little bit more forgiving of the ways that my mother fell short of my own expectations of her over the years and really helped me to see her as human.
Book Four: The Book you're Reading Now — Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry.
It is a really smart, fascinating, interesting book about wolves, sort of. She does a lot of research into the wolf repopulation out west and all of the sort of controversy and feelings that that brought up in people. And she also starts to look at the wolf in terms of what it represents and what it has represented for human beings for a long time through folklore and through fairytale and how the wolf has become a projection, right? We use the wolf as humans to project our fears. And so I love it because she weaves together research and science and storytelling and fairytale and memoir. So she's talking about her own experience where men are often her perceived threat. It weaves together all of these different strands. I'm only part way through, but excited to continue it.
Book Five: The Author’s Latest Book — Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson.
The first thing I wanted to ask you about is writing about your kids and how you approach that. You sort of alluded to it, but you write with tremendous nuance and tenderness about your oldest child and how she relates to her femininity. And that feels like a brave thing to do right now is to tackle that with all of that complexity. So yeah, curious how you approach that.
Yeah, so that was the most frightening thing that I've ever written. You know, there was a sort of like classic cliche writing wisdom, which is to write what scares you. And I'm like, well, I've done that here, written what makes me nauseous with fear. So there are, I think, a few topics in our culture, and kids and gender is one of them, where the public discourse is so polarized and politicized and so hijacked in public conversation by the extreme ends of the spectrum on both sides, the right and the left, that to convey any ambivalence, confusion can be actually seen, I'm situated politically on the left side of things, you know, that it can be seen as traitorous to your political affiliation. And I'm sure that goes the same for the right, right? But as I started to observe my oldest begin to migrate in middle school from the identity of a girl toward the identity of a boy, I was trying to process that as a parent, as a mother and really looking for narratives that grappled with what does it mean to mother a child during these explorations? How should I orient myself to my child? What is my role in this journey?
I did what I always do when I'm feeling confused about anything or need guidance, which is I tried to find examples of other parents who had written about confusion or uncertainty and I couldn't find any. The only first person stories that I could find from the parents of trans or non-binary children were op-eds in the service of a very politicized stance. And I felt extremely lonely and I began writing this essay almost because it didn't exist in the world because I knew there had to be parents out there who felt the way I did. And so I began to write it. And I use in that essay Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroine Rosalind as my guide. Almost all of the essays in the book engage with literature in some way because I've been a bookworm all my life and books and stories are often what I turn to when I'm grappling with confusion. So really writing that story from a parental perspective and using the language as a way to attend to my child as well as fully and attentively as I could.
I think reading it, I was aware of how much that voice had been missing of an open and accepting parent who still had some confusion and still was exploring what it meant for their own child as opposed to just a political idea. So I thought it was, I really appreciated reading it.
Thank you so much. And that actually was the essay that was selected for Best American Essays. And that moment for me, because I had been so terrified, that moment was… opening my email and learning that that essay had been selected for The Best American Essays 24 was honestly one of the most joyous moments of my life. I think it confirmed for me that there was a true need beyond my own personal need of processing these feelings that there was a need in our culture for a parenting story from this perspective.
Absolutely. Congratulations.
Thank you.
One other moment that I just, like kind of floored me was you write about having had a kind of cold reaction to your mother's nose job when you were a kid. And noses have come up weirdly often on our podcast. And I'm just going to quote you. You write, “before I know it, I'm that 13 year old girl at her mother's bedside understanding in a new way why my heart has hardened, it's because my mother has chosen public approval over my private devotion, generic beauty over her own particularity, and in doing so, she has shown me the limits of my love. If I cannot buttress my mother in all her beauty, what hope will there be for me? Why, I imagine, my daughter asks, should I care what anyone thinks of my hair when there is her, when there is us?” I just thought that was such a radically new way of understanding how we look at each other, mothers and daughters, and beauty and all of those beauty standards.
Hmm. Yeah. I had never thought of my mother as anything but beautiful growing up. And she had what I thought was a beautiful nose. You know, it was sort of curved and prominent. And when I was 13 years old, she decided to get a nose job. I had known sort of for years that her nose bothered her. And I found myself, after she got this nose job, feeling betrayed. I was angry at her and couldn't bring myself to talk to her for a while. I felt something had been taken from me. It wasn't until I had children of my own and daughters of my own and started thinking about this from the perspective of a mother too that I think I gained some clarity around that anger.
But for me, my mother was beautiful. And I described in the essay, her beauty is like the beauty of air. It's just factual. It's not up for debate. And when I saw the violence that she had done to herself, when I saw the aftermath, when I saw the bruises, when I saw the bandages, made me feel so small and powerless. And it really awakened in me how powerless I really was matched with the forces of our culture and the expectations of our culture, which had taught her that her nose was not beautiful, which, you know, I mean, there's a lot I could say about this in terms of, you know, the Jewish nose not being considered beautiful. I wasn't thinking in those terms then, right? But I certainly do now. And the nose that she replaced her nose with was sort of, you know, the ideal of a non-Jewish nose, right? It was sort of a little ski jump with an upturn. But the way that I experienced it as a girl was really more an awareness of how great and unvanquishable the forces of our culture were.
And I had the sort of full circle moment when I was in my early 40s and I'd always had, you know, maybe a couple of gray hairs here and there, but suddenly almost as if overnight they just started, you know, sprouting across my head. And I realized, you know, that if I didn't want to go gray, I was gonna have to color it and I did. And I, you know, just back to my normal brown, I didn't do anything crazy. And I walked in after my salon appointment and my daughter, my daughter was on the couch and was like, what did you do to your hair? And I said I colored it, you know, it was getting, it was getting a little gray. And I asked her, was like, do you like it? And she said, no, like I like it when you look like my mom. And it was the exact same thing, right? Like certainly a less violent way of changing oneself than a nose job. But I recognized the same sentiment in her. Why the hell do you have to do that? What's wrong with you the way you are? And it's complicated, as I write in that essay. I wish that that comment alone were enough for me to be like, I am never going to color my gray hairs again. But that's not what happened. As you can see, I do not have any gray hairs.
So, and that's again, the both-and-ness that I'm trying to grapple with, right? How can we recognize these things intellectually as women? I understand intellectually it should not matter whether I have gray hairs or not. Not only do I understand that intellectually, I understand that the strongest thing for me to do, the most true thing for me to do would be to stop dying my hair, right? But I am part of the culture that I also resist, right? It is in me. It is in all of us. So I think in so many things that we grapple with in terms of societal expectations, if only it were as easy as to say, that's the culture. That's its messed up messages. And this is me. And I reject those. But it's not that easy because all of those messages have gotten inside of us and under our skin and fused with us. And it's much messier than that.
Yeah, there's that complexity. The last bit that I wanted to ask you about, you write a beautiful and funny essay, “Tikkun Olam, Ted,” about the work of repair. And you know, obviously Tikkun Olam is this gorgeous, kabbalistic idea that the world was created with broken vessels and destroyed their sparks of the divine in all of us. Just wondering what it is about Tikkun Olam that you, that feels so resonant to you.
I love the idea that we can always begin where we are. I love the idea that we've made mistakes in the past and it's not necessarily our job, except perhaps on Yom Kippur, to repent for those mistakes, but to always look at the present. I think it's just very empowering, this sense of in every moment we have a choice of how to step into this moment, what to make of it. And we always have the power to do good. For me, it feels hopeful and liberating and freeing as well, that at any moment I can start anew. There's a wonderful Anne Frank quote about this, something to the effect of, isn't it wonderful that we always have the opportunity to begin now, to start now, to be better now. And I love the idea that we as humans are part of God's work. And I think that ties very much to Buber's I and Thou notion that God is within us. Goodness is something that we do, not something that we are.
That's beautiful. I wanted to just sort of end with a quote from you, which I found beautiful. And I also, I really feel like it ties each of these books that we've talked about together in this chapter that you were talking about, you write about As You Like It and Arden being the forest. And you talk about so often we are either a cheerleader or a gatekeeper for our kids, either speeding them toward where we want to go or keeping them from where we don't want them to go.
And you write: “Between those poles lies another way, which is to be Arden, a neutral witness to my children's wanderings, a shaded wood where they can play out their possible selves.” I thought that was so beautiful, I really related to that. As a mother, it brings in the Buber, it brings in the Of Woman Born, The Chosen. So thank you so much for talking about all of these books with us today.
I loved this conversation. It was so nice to dig into these books with you.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Nicole Graev Lipson talking about her book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, A Memoir in Essays. You can find a link to the book and all the others Nicole discussed in our show notes.
If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also now find us online at www.fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or on Facebook, the five books podcast.
I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dena Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
