Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson

What makes Nicole Graev Lipson’s debut memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Prism) so alluring is that it feels like a transgressive read. This isn’t because its narrator—a wife and mother of three, a former English teacher, happily married, deeply in love with her children—once contemplated an affair with a younger man, or admits her fervent desire for solitude, or struggles with herself over aging and beauty standards, though she does all of these things in clear-eyed yet mellifluous prose that makes these experiences fresh again.

No, what truly titillates is Lipson’s mind—the intellectual triple axels of her quest to find and free herself from the packaged plots of womanhood. As she unwinds the sometimes gossamer threads those plots weave through her life, Lipson reveals how even rigorous feminism strains against the stories that bind us, from an early age, to the roles women are meant to play on the stage of life. Her essays offer the mental equivalent of those pole-dancing-as-fitness-class videos I watch on Instagram: they are elegant, supremely athletic, airborne in their insights.

Lipson’s incisive mind can’t help outmaneuvering even a well-meaning therapist who applies the old my mom messed me up tale to Lipson’s depression as a young adult. “A Place, or a State of Affairs” references the time Lipson’s mother sent her to her room for a whole day over a small offense, which the therapist mused was a potential source of trauma. Lipson retrospectively questions this theory as a mother herself: “When my mother sent me to my room from morning to dusk—something she had never done before and never again would do—why had that day unfolded, for her, and so for me, in the particular way it did? This is the question that interests me now.” Lipson knows those easy stories of women, of mothers and daughters, erase too much of one another to satisfy her.

Even Lipson’s abundant love—for her parents, her husband Paul, her children, her friends—begets inquiries into its expression and often its built-in pain. Consider her breakdown of why being a perfect mother is unattainable yet imbued with the most urgent necessity:

The mother ideal, I’ve come to believe, is uniquely insidious, because what we feel to be at stake is so precious to us, and so at the mercy of our choices. For me, falling short of this ideal meant failing not just myself but the vulnerable human whose flourishing, I’d been led to believe, was exquisitely calibrated to my every move (126).

In “The Friendship Plot,” Lipson chronicles her decades-long friendship with Sara, Lipson’s former co-teacher. While out to dinner with their spouses, Lipson notices how she and Sara focus on one another, conversing “like two plucked guitar strings, all vibration and reverb.” She posits that such harmonizing between women may be rooted in mutual fascination. “Maybe we discover, in those who transfix us, clues to the person we’re aching to become,” she says.

In “Tikkun Olam Ted,” originally published here in River Teeth, Lipson tries to bond with her son at his Hebrew school service day. The events of the day and Lipson’s response to her son’s sullen behavior undergird a stunning meditation on the Jewish idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”): “As a Jew, I am not charged with regular repentance…My main task is to enter each moment looking for the good choice to make, the generous action to take, gathering whatever scattered sparks I see.” Her children’s “sparks are everywhere. The more I train my eyes to see them, the harder it becomes to lose sight of their light.” Lipson illustrates how mothers, like the God who created the imperfect world we live in, “pull back and allow” the people we have made to fill its fractures with their unique light.

And in “Thinkers Who Mother,” one of the collection’s strongest essays, Lipson revisits the tiresome weeks of bed rest she endured in her first pregnancy. Here, following doctor’s orders means leaving her job chairing the English department at her school. Lipson does so, willingly and immediately, for whatever potential it offers to save her pregnancy. But as the weeks pass, Lipson digs into the research and learns there’s no medical evidence that bed rest prevents pre-term labor. “Such a prescription could only exist in a world where complex and whole women are generally not the goal, and where smaller-scale attacks on mothers’ humanity are commonplace,” she writes. (Lipson carried her pregnancy to term and beyond).

Then there’s the “fictional characters” part of the memoir’s title. In Western culture, motherhood is idealized to the point of myth, but Western literature
complicates those myths. Lipson was no doubt the kind of English teacher I would have worshipped as a teen. She would have had me running around speaking in iambic pentameter and quoting Adrienne Rich at Sunday family dinner. But these literary references are not merely decorative; Lipson elevates the hard-won wisdom of personal experience with rigorous engagement with the texts that have shaped her feminism, teaching, and mothering.

“Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” the book’s opening essay, situates Lipson’s mother’s long-ago affair that ended her parents’ marriage against Chopin’s story “The Storm.” Chopin’s protagonist, Calixta, a housewife, has steamy, stormy sex with Alcee, a man from her past who takes refuge from the rain at her house while her husband and son wait out the weather at a local store. Everyone returns home safe and sound, and most importantly, to no sign of Calixta’s affair, especially not in her behavior, which is “lighter, more at ease,” according to Lipson. At first, the story suggests Calixta’s affair was a net good—she seems to emerge from it more committed to her family. But the story’s ending suggests this one-time thing won’t really be a one-time thing—more betrayal will happen. “The Storm” provides a lens through to view Lipson’s mother’s affair, arriving at this set of exquisite paradoxes:

My mother has been a bold pioneer, rebelling against the expectations of her generation. She’s been a coward, too fearful to directly voice her needs. She’s been selfless, quietly bearing unhappiness to avoid divorce. And she has been monstrously selfish, stoking her desires while the flames licked at her family’s heels.

My father has been an innocent victim. A guilty accomplice. A pillar of righteousness. A villain, bent on revenge.

Every time I open the book, the story changes. Its moral spins and shifts before my eyes (31).

But it’s in “As They Like It” that Lipson’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Western canon—particularly its dramas—pulls off some of the book’s most impressive acrobatics. Organized into five “acts” that mimic the Shakespearean comedy, the essay vacillates between Lipson’s love of Shakespeare’s Rosalind, who discovers the perks of being male in her costume as Ganymede, and Lipson’s navigation of her oldest daughter’s gender fluidity.

“As They Like It” was reprinted in Best American Essays 2024, not only for its structural daring but the courage of its questions. Lipson cites research about trans youth clinics where more patients are transitioning from female to male than the other way around. “One thing I think about as I read…is the difference between what it means to live as man and to live as woman—a difference that, since 2016, has only become grimmer for women,” Lipson writes. This is an important point, and Lipson, who fully supports trans rights and whose daughter has not yet asked to change her pronouns or start hormone treatments, expertly threads a needle between living her progressive Bostonian bona fides and questioning how our kids absorb and reflect the culture around them. The essay reminded me of when my daughter came home from school asking for a therapist because so many of her friends had one. On one hand, thank god our kids are normalizing things like therapy and embracing the notion of gender as a construct. On the other, how do we, as parents, know when to act on behalf of their well-being and when to simply enter their own forests of Arden, letting them lead the way?

For this essay and so many others in this dazzling debut, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters sets itself apart from any niche list of motherhood memoirs. Lipson’s subject matter may be familiar, but I promise you’ve read nothing like this before. In one of the book’s final essays, Lipson interrogates what it means to be a MILF (and of course also questions her desire to be one). But the essays that comprise this book are cognitively electric, intellectually graceful, and sexy as hell.

Chronicle Prism
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The Translator’s Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad

Grace Loh Prasad’s debut memoir, The Translator’s Daughter, both tenderly explores the death of loved ones overseas, and the precariousness and ordinariness of living as a third-culture kid. Prasad details her struggle for belonging as an itinerant woman, trying to maintain connections to her culture and language while still creating a life of her own in California.

Prasad’s memoir narrates an intricately complicated bicultural childhood. She was born in Taiwan to a large extended family, but political tensions with China forced the family to emigrate to America when Prasad was still a toddler. Her parents returned to Taiwan after she graduated high school, and she never again lived in the same country as them. Their reconnection with Taiwanese family and culture versus Prasad’s disconnection and distance lead her to interesting epiphanies about language and community. She grapples with the guilt of not living closer to her parents, especially as they age, but notes the difficulty of potentially living in Taiwan because of the language barrier. She admits to anger over this divide in her life and points out that she was in this position in part because her family’s move to America hadn’t been her decision. To compensate for these feelings of isolation from her homeland, Prasad finds herself depleted years later in California; she overextends herself as a literary citizen and her friends’ social organizer, and realizes it comes from needing to feel secure in a community. Without a family structure, she must initiate community for herself. These epiphanies act as a balm to readers also navigating competing identities.

Prasad makes a powerful creative decision to start her memoir with her experience of being stranded in the Taiwanese airport with an expired passport on a family visit, because it emphasizes her feelings of dislocation from the Asian diaspora. She must procure an updated American passport to Taiwan within twenty-four hours, or she will be sent back to the States. Though she feigns belonging with her appearance, she can barely communicate with the airport employees around her for help—she can’t write something as simple as her dad’s name. The tense airport scenes and Prasad’s frequent apologies represent the feeling of limbo that she describes living with her whole life as an “accidental immigrant.” Her willingness to sit with difficult questions and reveal her embarrassment and sadness over the language barrier echoes beautifully across the whole book. She returns to the airport in chapter four, “The Year of The Dragon, Part Two,” after two standalone essays, thereby teaching readers that the book requires they make connections just as Prasad must. The memoir’s mixture of traditional narrative writing with formally experimental essays (a list, a letter, etc.) suits Prasad’s hybrid life. In the airport chapters especially, Prasad’s thoughtful outlook goes beyond an in-the-moment struggle with isolation to elevating the memoir’s main stake: losing her parents who translate for her and connect her with her relatives, language, and knowledge of her hometown, Taipei.

As the memoir progresses, so does the physical decline of her family members’, all the more tragic because Prasad becomes further isolated. She slows down time in the scenes when discussing final care decisions for her parents: her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis changes her personality, and this is reflected through the more deliberate pacing. The measured movements in these sections help the reader understand how much Prasad’s life will change. Prasad’s father, the fifth of ten children of a Presbyterian minister and missionary, was fluent in four languages before he received his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. He became an expert in Bible translation—language was his trade—so it’s particularly tragic when Parkinson’s diminishes his ability to speak. Though surrounded by family while visiting him in the hospital, Prasad stands as the lone English speaker. At one moment, when he strains to communicate with them, Prasad notes, “As the translator’s daughter…I never had to worry about being stranded. But what happens when a translator can no longer speak?” Not only is she losing her family, but she also struggles to be in another country while grieving. After attending family events in honor of her father, she returns to California and notes, “I felt untethered and off balance, trapped in a strange world where everything looked familiar but nothing was the same.” Her memories of her parents are from another time and place, and the people in her day-to-day life don’t know them, making her grief feel like a painful secret.

Prasad adds further depth to this memoir by finding refuge in art as she makes sense of the ever-evolving complexity of her identity. Decades before her parents die, as a young adult in California, Prasad attends a screening of the documentary First Person Plural. The film centers on an adopted girl who discovers that she wasn’t actually an orphan after finding her birth family in Korea. Prasad realizes that she, like the main character, lives with the sorrow of the life unlived that exists in the shadows of the one she was thrust into. It was a unique revelation that was brought out through her personal affinities with art.

It was only after many years of identity struggles and family deaths that she is able to reconcile with the direction of her life moving away from her family to create art alone. The two aspects of her life being mutually exclusive is explained through her comparison of the goddess Inanna, and her legendary journey to the underworld that ended in the reversal of her death. Prasad describes the heartache of knowing her own tragedies have no undoing. She reckons with her only option being to honor her life and lost loved ones through her artform of writing, as no earthly thing could reverse her pain.

It is through her writing that Prasad leaves readers with powerful conclusions about home and belonging. The memoir is a reminder of the beautifully complex insights that result from extensive self-discovery. Despite the added psychic distance accompanied by the death of her parents, Prasad reaches an understanding and acceptance with her new life in California and relationship to Taiwan. Building toward a conclusion, Prasad notably remarks, “My husband and son are in California, but some part of me will always belong to Taiwan. This eternal ache is what it means to live in diaspora. Home, for me, is not an answer but a question.”

Women Surrounded by Water by Patricia Coral

It is no criticism of Woman Surrounded by Water to say that this exquisitely lyric memoir, with its remarkable range of narrative forms, contains few plot surprises. Put simply, water and men represent danger, while art, books, food, and female ancestors all seem to provide solace. These themes play across the memoir’s three major sections, land, shore, and ocean, like subtly pleasing musical motifs. 

“I was raised to fear the water,” writes Coral in the first sentence, and although she is talking about the ocean rather than rainwater, by the end of Women, the narrator will see, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, “La Plata dam overflowing. . . the street that goes to my parents’ house turned into a river. Currents of brown water drowning my parents’ neighborhood.”

Similarly, in one of the earliest chapters, “Marriage Addictions 1,” readers are told in the third paragraph that “I don’t have a picture of your forehead cut open”—a reference to a later scene where the narrator sees her husband strung out on drugs, with “red blood running through your nose. . . like a river flowing into the sea.” On an otherwise exhilarating first trip together, a newly-married, youthful Coral “asked you to stop ordering so many drinks at the bar”—thus signaling the nature of at least one of the addictions that will ultimately break this marriage.

As a child, Coral learned that for women, “If you didn’t have a man who loved you, who could prove you were loveable, you were incomplete.” In this respect, women are, we later learn like “the motherland,” who has “never been free.” “I was raised,” Coral tells us in an echo of the opening line, “to fear being left or abandoned.” She might well be talking about husbands. Yet she pivots immediately from gender to nation, from colonized bodies to colonized islands. “`Any day now the USA could tire of us and leave us to our own luck,’ they always told us.” And then, even more explicitly, “You are a woman, and you are an island.”

The trope of self-as-postcolonial-nation is, of course, well-trodden. There is the Buendía clan, representing a hundred years of solitary Colombian history; Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India’s independence, and thereby “handcuffed to history.” In nonfiction, to name just a few, we have Orwell’s elephant representing the British Empire and Baldwin imagining God has marked his father’s death with a Harlem race riot.

What is freshly powerful here, though, is the potent and direct invocation of woman as a tiny, dependent commonwealth, and the innovative riffing Coral does with this metaphor. Thus, we have both marital storms and meteorological ones, both spousal and government abandonments. Of the handful of original poems she includes in the memoir, one of the most poignant, “ruta panorámica,” is about the latter, the “blue tarps of FEMA” which “Never get here/In time.” 

Such profound and intersecting forms of powerlessness might be expected to lead to outrage. However, rather than anger, a tone of tender melancholy permeates Women Surrounded by Water. At times Coral’s calmness is deeply moving, as when she comments on a picture of her great-grandmother: “I wonder if this photo was taken before or after your husband hit you.” 

At other times, Coral reports former rage and grief in a matter-of-fact register that almost plays as surreal understatement. After describing attending the funeral of a nineteen-year-old drug dealer shot seven times, she states, addressing her husband, “I was angry at [the dealer] for selling drugs to people like you and at you for buying them. I was sad there was nothing I could do to save [him]. To save you.” Suffice it to say, here, that many spouses would be too enraged to even attend the funeral of a criminal who helped sustain their life partner’s addictions, let alone feel regret over not being able to save him.

Roughly speaking, the first act of the narrative here is the story of the author’s unhappy marriage. The second is the tale of fleeing Puerto Rico after her divorce, and making a diasporic life for herself in Houston, one which culminates, first, in the agony of not knowing for days whether her family is still alive during Hurricane Maria, and then in the relative solace of offering her house as a refuge for migrants fleeing the chaos. The final act is a kind of denouement, where the narrator rescues her medical resident brother from a severe case of PTSD-induced isolation in his apartment, brought on, it seems, chiefly by the horrors he saw volunteering in the island’s post-Maria hospitals.

Close to the end of the memoir, a prose poem entitled “the one who learns to swim in the ocean” focuses on wholeness: “And I stick myself together. Each time a little faster.” Here, although literally, of course, Patricia Coral has not returned to live in Puerto Rico—she resides in Washington, DC and, though bilingual, chose to publish her memoir in English—it is as if she has overcome her childhood warnings about sea currents, which were also admonitions about husbands and colonizers. The dangers are not gone, but Coral has learned that she is “a daughter of the ocean” where sea creatures call her name—the name which is also that of “[c]orals [that] can live on their own but are primarily associated with the communities they construct.”

One such community Coral builds appears to be that of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Another is literary, as evidenced by the book’s generous and lengthy acknowledgements. A third is Coral’s female ancestors, who loom, at the end of the memoir, much less as foci of the narrator’s curiosity and more as muses or companions.

“Abuela, I am your ink and pen,” she writes, underneath what seems, from the clothing and furniture, to be a picture of her grandmother, and labelled somewhat confusingly, although also in an act of homage, “author’s pic.” Coral continues, “Sentences that you left unsaid… I take the voice that drowned in your throat and write you.” Here, as a South African American, I am reminded of the well-known isiZulu concept from my own childhood, ubuntu. This means, more or less, “I exist because you exist,” a more radical formulation of “No man is an island.” Abuela is an author here because Patricia is an author, and questions about whether an author’s pic needs to be of the person who literally typed the words into the computer, or the person whose spirit and example inspired the project—well, such concerns seem, in the light of all the weighty issues this memoir so brilliantly dramatizes, ultimately ephemeral.

Poetic, intelligent, formally and culturally hybrid, and emotionally powerful, Women Surrounded by Water offers an important meditation on gender, family, imperialism, and natural disasters, amplified by factors like anthropogenic climate change and official indifference. It also introduces into the creative nonfiction genre an eloquent, sensitive, and talented new voice.

The Exit is the Entrance: Essays on Escape (part of the Crux series) by Lydia Paar

The Exit is the Entrance is a collection of essays on leaving—going to as well as away from—college, the military, relationships, wrong decisions. It is a series of ruminative journeys written in first, second, and third person long-form essays, in which Paar explores creativity, erasure, our connection to the earth and each other in lyrical prose. Set mostly in the Southwestern United States, Paar also travels back and forth across the country and down to Peru.

The essay “Drive” begins with a short poem:

When I was a teenager, I wished to be a trucker. I should say,
rather, the profession was in my top-ten list of future plans.
I was drawn to open roads.
Delighted at the thought of a distant boss, I ached for new
lands.
Airbrakes excited.

Paar instead follows the traditional path for a high school graduate, taking a bus from Portland, Oregon to northern California with her mother to attend a private college she couldn’t afford, and quickly abandons. Paar is pulled between what society says she should do, and the desire for an extraordinary life. Her longing for travel and solitude is a constant theme in The Exit is the Entrance. And yet, interspersed between these essays of escape, there are stories of staying—in school in the desert; with a father who “…offered me a guest room to land in: a room with a tiny twin bed, tucked into a suburb safe from homelessness…”; at various jobs and in contact with various people. In this way, Paar is not in a constant state of flux, but rather experiences “…years of successive risk and recovery.”

Another theme in The Exit is the Entrance is erasure—losing yourself entirely in an experience so that you are no longer aware of your own self. Erasure to Paar is both a goal and a wound. It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around at first, but as she explains in the essay, “Erasure,”

Living in the desert, you began to feel that if you could erase
yourself enough, your various moods and agendas, needs and
desires, you could simply become a pair of ears to hear, eyes to
see, and hands to translate: purer, uncluttered,
uncompromised. But see, hear, and translate what, and to
whom? You opened your eyes wider, put your ear to the dirt.

[…] Your mind, like this new land, opened out widened, and for
the first time you couldn’t find the ends of it.

In this way, erasure is a subsummation into the essence of being—not a negative annihilation, but instead losing oneself into the flow and connection of the universe, where there is no “I” or “you” but instead only the attachment to humanity and the natural world. But Paar also uses erasure to reckon with our colonial past, writing,

The term “erasure” has been used, in the American West and
around the world, to describe the effects of colonization on
indigenous peoples—you didn’t need the college classes to
know this by now.

I found the use of second person in this essay to be incredibly intimate, allowing the reader to slip effortlessly into her skin. The play between first, second, and third person essays in this collection mimics the movement of the theme, going towards intimacy in first and second, and away from it when she switches to third person. The point of view zooms in and out in the way the essays travel from close relationships to the aloneness of the between times.

The essays are an exploration of liminal spaces, both the physical spaces, such as onboard greyhound buses and other modes of transportation, or the hostel where she lives and works for a time; and more figurative spaces, such as liminal friends and experiences. In the essay, “Osmosis,” Paar writes about attending the music festival Coachella. She surrenders to the music-induced erasure she seeks, but returning to the campground, Paar finds herself longing for connection. She writes,

And I grew restless for the weekend to end, to return to a
community connected with a more common contemporary
reality. This fun was good fun, but it didn’t, couldn’t, extend
beyond itself.

One of the more idiosyncratic spaces she explores is that of funerals and the funeral businesses, truly the epitome of transition. In “Hope for Sale,” Paar passes as a mortuary intern in order to attend a conference where she learns about embalming, reconstruction, and other aspects of “death care.” She ruminates on the juxtaposition of the concern for the grieving alongside the business ramification of the industry, the attention we give at the end of a life versus the care we take with the living.

If human communities put the kind of energy that we put into
grooming and mourning our dead into people still living on the
brink of death, could this life, finally, be less abrasive? Could
we learn to live in peace, not just come to rest at its end?

Yet, this essay is not just concerned with the global discussion of mourning; rather, Paar artfully braids the story of her friendship with (and eventual loss of) Kate, a recently divorced woman struggling with bipolar disorder, taking the universal discussion to the personal, intimate level. This telescoping out and in of a subject is a hallmark of the collection. Even the essays on traveling and escaping are also rooted in something bigger, more important that the current moment.

These lands mirror the oceans once contained in them,
reminding you how even seeming stability (like rock) and flux
(sea salt water) interchange over time, which reminds you (yet
again) just how connected all earthscapes and the creatures
within them are.

Throughout this collection, Paar, while in a perpetual journey towards and away from situations, places, and people, finds herself drawn to the universal experience.

Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances by Lucas Mann

Lucas Mann’s essay collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances interrogates fatherhood tropes, both challenging them and recognizing their role in describing and creating the cultural landscape of Mann’s own early fatherhood.

He writes in “On the Fantasies of Various Apocalypses” that fatherhood stories are hard to separate from those of leaving adolescence, each of them a story of becoming, after which a man has become, permanently, himself. They’re wrong about that; there’s nothing singular or finished about becoming, but these stories mark the world we’re growing from. Adopt, adapt, or reject them, they’re still our reference points. These essays consider what to do with that.

The all-speculative first essay, which the book’s running header helpfully shortens to “Tiny, Spectacular Futures,” is a list of fantasies—hopes and fears for the little person the expectant parents have yet to meet and for the world she will inhabit.

In a mimetic skid from the imaginings of pre-parenthood to the grinding realities of daily and nightly childcare (the essays often return to the trauma of sleep training), the second essay uses a 24-section structural conceit: “An Approximate Hourly Record of Thought and Feelings During a Time of Intense Sleep Deprivation.” A collection of fragments, their common connection is the anxiety of influence as a writer and reader, as a product of and participant in a broader culture, and as a son and a father. Mann puzzles over separating communities from doctrine, and whether he’d be capable of that duality: “…if I was raised by racists, I’m pretty sure I’d be a racist” (22). And the anxiety of being influenced is inextricable from the anxiety of the influence a father casts on his child, even if you’re hyper aware of it as it’s happening.

Mann and I have a lot common. There’s our approximate ages. Our daughters. Entering fatherhood in our thirties. Our writer-teacher-academic careers. The beautifully collaborative parenting partnership with wives whose own professional accomplishments are demanding, and which we support and admire. (His wife is very present in the essays, but his apology in the acknowledgments hints he doesn’t want to exploit her for content or claim her separate experiences as his own in these essays, either.) There are the privileges these lives offer us, being able to be at home enough to do necessary and tedious and heartmelting and burnout-level caregiving in ways that other jobs wouldn’t allow.

Relatability is weak criticism, but I recognize a lot. You should have seen me (and I’m about to make you) the way my wife did coming back into the darkened hotel room after a rigorous on-site job interview, our bottle-refusing daughter finally surrendered to exhaustion, me shirtless and covered in what used to be bottled breast milk, and me feral-eyed at her with the so-help-me-if-you-wake-up-this-goddamn-baby look. And like with Mann’s essays, when my wife and I tell this story now, everybody knows it’s a love story.

These aren’t stories of incompetent fathers being sweet idiots at caregiving, as in many popular narratives. The messy realities of parenting your own child can make anybody look clumsy, but here it’s never that Mann feels like he’s doing a job—labors practical, emotional, and intellectual—that isn’t his to do. To paraphrase a famous t-shirt: dad’s not babysitting.

More commonalities: the debilitating self-awareness recognizable across much Gen-X and Millennial literature, and the perpetual uncertainty of whether anything one does is a sincere choice or a performance of not wanting to be seen and judged. But there’s also the way that the ongoing, concrete demands of care and the humility of nurturing an increasingly autonomous, defiant, and endearingly weird little being can mercifully crowd out all of that. There’s the existential creation of meaning in the doing of the things.

And so, there’s the paradox of seeing a community of dads (or dad bloggers), and responding by turning not toward an all-father community, but back inward to himself and his family (like me to myself and mine; totally get that).  That question of performing actual fatherhood in context of actors and writers and bloggers and other parents rhetorically performing fatherhood is a central concern across the collection.

“An Essay about Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really about My Own Shit” smartly examines Pitt’s unselfconscious masculinity, with that affect and Pitt’s body contrasting Mann’s very different self on both counts, and, more importantly, raising how he and his wife don’t want to pass their own childhood body insecurities to their daughter. But the sharp analysis outward is cut with recognition of what he’s also projecting onto the icons he’s reading:

All I want to do is talk about his body and how noticeable it is to me, how noticeable every body is—that’s the problem—and how insulting to think that nobody makes him account for himself. This is the greatest privilege afforded in my fantasy of thinness: that it eventually might allow you to disappear—to other people, sure, but most of all to yourself (55).

Interrogating media, narrative, literature, how we talk about stuff, is central to the book (and to all the writer and reader types I know), but these essays always come back to a reality, feet on the ground, that all our analysis of media and culture and self can unmoor us from. One essay takes on the distraction of the phone and the life that also happens on it, which is exponentially complicated by parenting and the performance of parenting on social media. He shows the very real value of documenting moments for ourselves. The life online and off still happens, no matter how we intellectualize it.

In “Dads Being Dudes Making Jokes,” he interviews some dad bloggers and contemplates dad joke tropes, the laziest jokes, the anti-intimate puns, the jokes that disclaim responsibility for emotional labor. But the buffoon father of those jokes is at least safe, he says, not a monster: “Part of the joke is you can screw up in all these ways and still be lovable, still be good, but then the line between good and bad gets pretty thin, and then the joke becomes unforgivable” (169).

Mann recognizes how ubiquitously and how unfairly “parenthood” has often just been “motherhood,” and how motherhood literature (and mom bloggers) by necessity have been at it much longer than the just-arrived father-writers looking to do more with their stories and their lives than just repeat their inherited tropes, even if they’re still our reference points.

In an essay appearing later in the collection, a respected elder fiction writer laments from a public stage “kids these days” shying away from the wartime shoot-em-ups he saw as the substance of highest literature. But when, over dinner, he told an honest story about being helpless trying to wrangle his sick and hungry twins, Mann was struck that the famous writer shied away from thinking that could also be the stuff of serious story.

The fathers of wars and apocalypses and high adventure dramas aren’t going anywhere (Mann sees the dad in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as endearingly sincere amid the horror). But more honest domestic father stories are emerging, and these essays are part of that new tradition. Individually, such stories won’t make a smoldering cultural crater the way a good ol’ post-apocalyptic horror show might. So, to crack the too-simple, too-evasive tropes that have dominated father stories for so long, we’re going to need a lot more of these, a lot more often, and for a long time.