In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives.

What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she’s testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she’s raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.

As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin’s erotic story “The Storm” helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth’s most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one’s frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare’s gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.

Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves—and the ones we’re still becoming.

“Sensitive, searingly intelligent, and beautifully written.”—Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma