Poetry of Small Moments
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer Nicole Graev Lipson
Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond.
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Millions, LA Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays, and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and three children. Last month Nicole wrote this beautiful essay for Beyond!
What are you reading now?
I recently finished Sara Sherbill’s gorgeous, wrenching, utterly stunning memoir There Was Night and There Was Morning, which is a book that will stay in my bones for a while. I’m now a few chapters into Erica Berry’s Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear and already know for sure I’m going to love it.
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
I devoured and re-read everything by Roald Dahl. I was a pretty obliging and rule-abiding person as a girl, and I think I was drawn to how blunt and irreverent and boundary-pushing Dahl’s books were. The BFG was one of my children’s favorite books, too, when they were younger. We used to listen to the audiobook during long car rides, which affirmed for me Dahl’s genius, but now from an adult perspective. That book is so outlandish and goofy but also so tender.
The book I hid from my parents was Judy Blume’s Forever—probably along with every other Gen-X middle school girl?! My neighbor Isabelle left her copy at my house by accident, and I never gave it back. I flipped so often to the pages with the sex scenes that they became a little tattered. It was from that book that I learned what sex actually was and could be, beyond the clinical knowledge I’d gleaned about making babies.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
My favorite reread is Jane Eyre, which is the first book I truly, deeply, madly fell in love with as a girl, because it awakened me to my own internal life as a female on this planet. It was my assigned reading the summer before ninth grade, and I have the most delicious memories of lying on my family’s couch in the golden summer late afternoon light getting lost in its pages. The story! The insights! And Jane was so real, I felt as if she were my friend and I, her confidante. I taught that book a few times in my years as a high school English teacher and never grew tired of revisiting it. In some ways, digesting and processing and discussing the book with my students made its magic all the more dazzling.
A book I will always be grateful for is Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work, which I discovered during a dark period of early motherhood when I was feeling particularly inept and unworthy and ashamed of myself for all the ways I couldn’t live up to my vision of what a “good mother” was. Cusk’s radical honesty about her own experiences as a new mother made me feel less alone in my struggles—reading her words was like gulping down water in the desert.
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
There’s this one style of high-waisted joggers that I discovered about five years ago and own three pairs of, and I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself if Beyond Yoga ever stops making them. They’re the perfect article of clothing because they’re cozy enough to sit at a desk in for hours, but just stylish enough to pass for actual, acceptable adult attire when I leave the house. I love that I can just be in them—and don’t have to hide the solitary, introverted, writer version of myself to face the world.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
My dearest friend Sara—about whom there’s a whole chapter in my book Mothers and Other Fictional Characters—often sends me screenshots of her current reading with certain sentences underlined that she loved or thought I would love. She recently sent me a passage of Goethe about the strange alchemy that occurs when a person stays steadily true to her intentions:
“Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: then moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves in too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred….Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Life has taught me this lesson again and again—and again and again I forget it. I should really print these words out and tack them to my office bulletin board. When we believe in ourselves and our dreams with true conviction, the gears of the world start turning in relation.
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
When I was eight years old, my family adopted a mixed breed rescue dog, Piper, who lived until I was a few years out of college. She was scruffy and testy and surly with strangers, but with our family she was deeply devoted and profoundly empathic. I have a visceral memory of her literally licking my tears from my cheeks when I sat crying on my bed after a fight with my brother. I can’t think of my childhood without thinking about her.
What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
I grew up in New York City and never in a million years would have predicted I’d one day move to a Boston suburb and raise my family here. I’m a bone-deep New Yorker and love that city with every inch of my being—and at the same time, I’m so happy in mid-life to live in a smaller, quieter place, and in a community where my children feel known and held and seen.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
Dancing in the kitchen! This is actually one of my family’s favorite after-dinner activities. We put on music while we’re clearing the table and wiping down the counters and have a sort of roving dance party. Occasionally, we bust out our little portable strobe light.
What are your hopes for yourself?
My constant, daily hope for myself is to be more present in my life, and more attuned to the meaning and poetry of its small moments. This takes constant work and vigilance! The internet and my to-do list and the frenetic over-activity of my anxious brain pulls me from this presence over and over.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
My college writing professor Lydia Fakundiny was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Not in a sweet, saccharine way—she was actually quite intense and formidable and scary—but in her deep generosity of spirit when it came to her commitment to her students. I took her class “The Art of the Essay” my junior year, and it was in her classroom that I discovered my love of creative nonfiction, and where hope first flickered in me that I might one day become a writer. She showed me the kindness of taking my work seriously—responding to the pieces I turned in with two pages of typed notes. I’m not sure I would ever have found the courage to become a writer if weren’t for her belief in me.
What’s a guiding force in your life?
Love. In my darkest, hardest, most activated moments, I will tell myself, “Nicole, choose love”—and miraculously, this sometimes actually works.
If you enjoyed Nicole’s questionnaire, you may also enjoy this one with
:
Nicole,
I literally just put your essay collection on hold from the library last night. How serendipitous to see this lovely interview with you and Jane today!
Jane, as always, I value so much the way you conduct these interviews. They always feel so intimate to me, like I'm sitting in the room with both of you, listening raptly to the conversations. They never feel rushed, always slow and intentional, just the way I try to live each day. Thank you.
Beautiful interview.