Oct 11, 2018
What I Imagined Motherhood Would Be, and What It Is
When you give birth to a life, you are also giving birth to a death.
Lynn Steger Strong's first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in March 2016. She received an MFA from Columbia University and her non-fiction has been published in Guernica, LARB, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.
When you give birth to a life, you are also giving birth to a death.
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
I was embarrassed each time I got out my camera.
I want to write about space and time, and feeling like somehow we’ve always had less of it than our male counterparts.
In fiction, one needs motivations, wants, and fears; one needs cause and effect. In life, it’s messier.
On Virginia Woolf, making hats, escapism, and how to write a novel that readers will read.
