I Don’t Want to Be Claire Dederer’s “Poser”
Dispensing with role-playing may be, I think after reading Dederer’s book, necessary to becoming a fully realized adult. And if I am to become a mother, as “a fully realized adult” is the only way I want to do it.
Celia Paul’s Remarkable Removal
What many mothers might consider anathema, and what Paul herself describes as sacrifice, was the very thing necessary to being both mother and artist.
Rachel Cusk’s Translated Will
To have a child is to surrender one’s will rather than exerting it. The child does not exist as the perfect external realization of an internal intention. His own will interferes in the determination of his outcome.
Meghan Daum’s “Central Sadness”
If in the future I find myself sometimes lonely and aimless, empty in an undefinable way, will I be able to talk about it without the question of children coming up?
Shirley Jackson’s Motivating Motherhood
I wonder: would having babies motivate me? Would it supercharge my focus and force me to finish my book?
Rachel Cusk & The Sanctity of the Writer’s Room
So why, we might ask, doesn’t she have manuscripts, notebooks, cocktail napkins—all the anticipated ephemera of the working writer?
It’s because she is a mother.