MOTHERS AND OTHER FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

Intimate essays on contemporary womanhood.

Award-winning essayist, journalist, and critic Lipson, a 44-year-old mother of three, makes an impressive book debut with a gathering of 12 deeply thoughtful essays on the transitions, joys, and challenges that have marked her life. Anchored by topics such as motherhood and daughterhood, friendship and marriage, beauty, aging, and gender stereotypes, the essays cohere into a revealing memoir. Often, Lipson finds wisdom—or at least comfort—in fictional depictions of women. “There are books that seem to glide into our lives at a particular time as if by design,” she writes, “finishing thoughts just partially formed in our minds.” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was one, with college freshman Lipson connecting with the sexual stirrings of Chopin’s transgressive Edna. As a mother, confused by her oldest daughter’s apparently fluid gender identity, Lipson found enlightenment in Shakespeare’s cross-dressing Rosalind from As You Like It and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She finds solace in Alice Munro’s depiction of motherhood as a “heroic journey,” in which mothers are thinking beings. Lipson is candid about the tensions and worries generated by mothering: She feels unsettled, for example, about letting her son play with guns, part of a larger concern about the cultural messages he’s learning about manhood. A loving wife in a happy marriage, still, she acknowledges a gnawing desire for solitude. Sometimes, she wonders “if marriage, with its contractual origins, can ever fully transcend the transactional. In a marriage, it can feel as if something is always owed, because it’s entirely impossible, despite the gauzy hopes we pin on matrimony, for two people to fulfill each other’s every need.” With empathy and grace, Lipson unravels the tangle of “illusory standards” that weigh on any marriage and any woman’s sense of self.

Deftly crafted essays likely to resonate with grateful readers.