If you can, try to publish before you have kids. This was the parting advice from one of my MFA professors, with whom I’d been studying creative writing for two years.
It was the way she said it, too: both apologetic and practical. She was sorry she had to say it, but this was the reality. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions. I understood. I was 26. I’d gone to a top liberal arts college. My female friends with whom I’d graduated were also seeking postgraduate degrees or they were in hospital residency programs. One was working 16-hour days for Goldman Sachs. We were modern women. Unlike women of our mothers’ generation, motherhood was understood to be an add-on. Homemaking, beneath us. What I’m saying is that my professor’s advice made perfect sense.
When I finally did have a baby—after having sold a book proposal for what would become my first book—and I hired a babysitter to watch him for a few hours three days a week, I was 32 and living in Los Angeles. The babysitter went by the nickname Chachi. I’d gotten her information from a neighborhood mom (Ph.D., older than me) who used her as well. Chachi was Hispanic and in her early fifties. I’d double-majored in writing and Spanish, and I enjoyed practicing my rusting-out language skills with her. One morning, she was telling me about her young daughter who already had a baby, and I’ll never forget what she said to me: Gringos, she said matter-of-factly, as if an anthropologist, like to have babies when they’re old.
Did I spit out my coffee? Surely I must’ve smiled. Chachi wasn’t wrong. But also: No! We don’t “like” it. It was simply how we were bred. It was the water in which we were swimming.
One scene in Erin Somers’s novel The Ten Year Affair, which came out last fall, describes this water perfectly. Set in the present day, our main character, Cora, a late-thirties wife and mother, is lying in bed with a book opened on her chest. Her husband asks her what she’s reading, and she cannot remember. She has to pick it up to remind herself (To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf).
Her husband then asks “why [her book club] never read anything sexy like that dragon book that was so big right now. The one that groups of women loved. Why was it always so heavy?”
“‘You know why,’ [Cora] said,” before the narrative voice kicks in to elaborate:
The women in the club had grown up a specific way and gone to specific colleges. They’d gone to Vassar or Bard or, like Jules, Columbia. Now they lived in a town that had a feel. They were not suburban in their preoccupations; they were thoughtful and sophisticated. They had to prove this to each other over and over. They had to prove it to the world too, by posting the book club picks online with the caption “Currently loving.”
And herein lies my problem: despite having gone to a specific college, and living in a town that definitely has a feel (the east side of Los Angeles, where standard-bearer Democrats are considered conservative and part of the problem), despite having checked off box after box of the modern, educated woman’s playbook, many of my preoccupations have been and remain, as Erin Somers puts it: suburban. Childcare, cooking, gardening, and youth sports (even as these are also present in urban and rural life, of course). What is perhaps most confusing is that I believe these suburban preoccupations have made me more thoughtful, in some ways more sophisticated.
While I have come to believe, to know, that an educated woman can be preoccupied with homemaking without losing her critical thinking skills, literary fiction seems to never, ever show us as much. At least not today: Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf needed no persuading that domesticity was its own rich text. No, literary fiction today requires that a progressive, self-actualized modern woman find her freedom at the expense of, and in the rebellion against, traditional roles.
I first noticed the trend back in 2018 with the publication of Sheila Heti’s book, Motherhood, which is not a book about motherhood but rather an autofictional account of a 38-year-old female writer wrestling with her decision not to have children. At the time, I was a big Sheila Heti fan, and yet I was palpably annoyed that she’d been able to publish a book boringly titled Motherhood without having to be a boring mother. (As I write this, the words of the poet Brenda Shaughnessy come to mind: “I know I am his mother, but I can’t / quite click on the word’s essential aspects, / can’t denude the flora / or disrobe the kind of housecoat / “mother” always is. Something / cunty, something used.”)
My annoyance over Heti’s book title felt quite earned. In 2018, I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. And wouldn’t you know it? I had also written an autofictional book, except of course this one was about motherhood. How could it not be? It was how I spent my days. And in many ways the book emphasized this very point: how being a mother was inherently uncool. In order to be cool or taken seriously at all by my peers in Los Angeles, one had to do something else. Notably, no publisher wanted this book, even though I enticingly titled it Wildcat—a title that said: Sure, the main character is a mother, but don’t worry: she is wild. She is fun! Heti’s book and mine were like the Iceland and Greenland of motherhood books, hiding the actual content under a misleading title. (My book would eventually sell, two years later, after I added a lot more plot.)
But in 2018, I mostly let my annoyance burn out. I was still reeling from Trump’s first election. The future hadn’t turned out to be female, and I was “making space” for all the various women protagonists. (Not the male ones though, unless they were gay.) So, whatever. Let Sheila Heti live her best childfree life.
Six years, one pandemic, and two presidential-election cycles later, however, in 2024, I found myself in an altered state. I’d also found it increasingly tricky to fit in with my peers. Online, I kept catching bits of the “tradwife” discourse. If you haven’t come across the term, please know that it gives me no pleasure to explain to you what it is; the term is essentially 2020s-era internet shorthand for right-wing-coded women who promote traditional gender roles within a family context on social media. This is from Wikipedia:
Many creators have gone viral for videos performing domestic labor such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children.
On the one hand, yes, I understand why my peers and the left in general have been mostly hostile to this group. Because women have advanced beyond this point. Of course we have. We can hire other people to cook, clean, and care for our children while we focus on our real passions. Or while we are simply making a living, keeping a toehold in the work world. And yet, another part of me wants to ask, “Well, what are these online creators cleaning? Is it, by chance, their walls?” Because mine are covered in faint charcoal, child-sized-fingerprint smudges which bother me, and despite my education and the fact that we can afford a cleaning woman who cleans our house twice a month, I can’t bring myself to ask her to also scrub the walls. This leaves me to do it of course, and I would honestly like some tips because the Magic Eraser thing is hardly scalable.
Then, in early 2024, the New Yorker writer and literary critic Merve Emre (the most educated mother of them all), gave a Substack interview that both explained and doubled down on a book review she’d written that rebuked a mother for writing straightforwardly about her child. Here’s Emre:
You don’t have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism that’s about a book … and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.
From my point of view, all of this discourse combined to feel like an odd censuring of the housewife—or in the words of our times, a censuring of “one’s truth” as a mother. And it was all coming from the same place: the left and the literary community. So much so that when I read Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, which came out in 2025 and is a memoir about Li’s sons, both of whom died by suicide, a sarcastic voice in my head popped in to ask the question: Is this okay, Merve? Now, may a highly educated woman write a book that focuses solely on her children—once they are tragically dead and gone?
The year 2024 also brought the sensation that was the publication of Miranda July’s autofictional novel All Fours, a truly unavoidable book in my milieu. July herself has been a little bit unavoidable in my life. She lives a few-minutes drive away from me; I have seen her around town a couple of times—once at Whole Foods with her child—and I have even met her twice; she is just a handful of years older than me; ostensibly my peer. So that even as the plot of her book is absurd—the July-esque main character abandons a cross-country road trip in favor of wooing a hot man she spots from her car—I still felt close to it.
Any book by July would probably have been a commercial and critical success because she’s such a fascinating person and compelling writer. And yet, I cannot help but believe that it was also a runaway success because its plot preaches the gospel of social innovation and progress. It’s a book that isn’t just saying the obvious, that mothers/women no longer have to stay in a stifling marriage. It’s moving a step beyond. It’s saying that mothers, women, and children don’t have to stay within anything, really. This is the 2020s! We can all be free.
In many ways, All Fours felt in direct conversation with Motherhood. July and Heti are the queens of autofiction. They are the stars of serious female literature, and the women also appear to be friends. (July has promoted Heti’s books on social media in a quite personalized manner.) In Motherhood, there’s what feels like a momentous scene in which the narrator uncomfortably picks up a friend’s baby. Her instinct is to hold the baby facing away from her, so that the baby can “see the world.” This is then contrasted with how the mother holds her baby, which is facing towards her own body. The narrator notes that “the baby seemed happy, turned into that warmth.” It’s a small moment but a big metaphor. The domestic life is inward-facing and small. The childfree life is outward-looking and expansive.
In All Fours, this is also the vibe, complete with a pivotal scene of turning “away” from the baby. All Fours’s protagonist is a 45-year-old artist living on the east side of Los Angeles who decides to embark on a solo drive across the country. She’s in a rut and this trip is supposed to be a big adventure. And to take it, she must leave her elementary school-aged child at home with her husband. But then, in a plot twist that had me chuckling to myself for days, she abandons the trip just thirty minutes in, in Monrovia. (I have driven four times as far for a youth hockey game.) She checks into a crappy motel where she ends up staying indefinitely as she pursues exactly what she wants to pursue, including a crush on a local guy named Davey. She goes back and forth on what to do about her feelings for Davey, when finally she finds him in the parking lot outside of his workplace. As they flirt, a parallel scene is unfolding: that of a nameless mother and her young son. July writes, “The child was refusing to walk and the woman was demanding that he come, right now. What would the mom do? Would she hold her ground? Or give in, forever spoiling the child? It wasn’t my problem,” our narrator thinks. “I turned my body so that I couldn’t see how it resolved.”
I especially like what July does in the final paragraph of this chapter, by which time Davey has asked her out and our narrator has agreed to the date, a few hours later on that same night. She’s already considering her outfit, but the other mom in the parking lot, the one tethered to her child—her conflict remains ongoing.
The child was on his back now, lying on the sidewalk. The mom was at her wits’ end. She was about to lose it. I turned and walked away. What would I wear? Or was it better not to change? KIERAN, she bellowed. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.
Which “mom” is losing it—the narrator who has agreed to meet up with Davey, which will mark the beginning of the end of her marriage, or the mom in the parking lot yelling at her child? Ditto, whose last chance is it? The child’s, or the narrator’s perimenopausal body? The choice is yours. What’s not seemingly debatable is who is more free. The answer to that is clear.
While I have come to believe, to know, that an educated woman can be preoccupied with homemaking without losing her critical thinking skills, literary fiction seems to never, ever show us as much.
Which brings me back to Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, published in the fall of 2025. This one didn’t get as much attention as All Fours (an impossible bar) but definitely received a fair amount, and it was also chosen by Dakota Johnson’s book club.
Like All Fours, The Ten Year Affair is an incredibly entertaining book. It’s sharp and very funny—a fight scene between two women inside a walk-in pantry is borderline hilarious. And the plot, with its Sliding Doors–esque setup, is perfectly executed. To quickly summarize: the main character, Cora, is a mother and wife who both has an affair and doesn’t. There are two timelines, and the reader follows both. And while the setting of The Ten Year Affair is not eastside Los Angeles, it is upstate New York, which felt similar. I recognized the moneyed (or at least moneyed-enough), educated, NYC-adjacent crowd and Cora’s role within it as a mother and wife with a day job.
And of course, I recognized the lack of cultural importance placed on motherhood. I recognized motherhood as an activity to be handled, nothing to dwell upon or lose oneself within. And because of Cora’s day job and the general pace of modern life, there’s not enough time to gain emotional fulfillment from it either. She is simply managing.
Indeed, the reason Cora is able to have an affair without coming off as an asshole is because the book (in this first section) devalues ordinary family life so well and completely. Devoting oneself to one’s children, husband, and family is not going to propel her forward to a place where everything will eventually be great. The reader sympathizes with her lowly status and general stagnation. The affair is an escape hatch. The affair represents choice and progress.
Is it any wonder, then, that one of my favorite passages is when, halfway through the book, we flip to the “other” timeline, the one where Cora doesn’t cheat and where she instead decides to have a third child? In this timeline, her husband, talking about babies, says, “Remember how nice they are?”
Cora remembered. Their pleasing heft. The soft cubes of their feet. The way they fell asleep on your shoulder with their mouths smushed to one side. Their unguarded love. The way they held out their arms to indicate they wanted to be picked up. The shared project of them. How they bound you together by making you suffer acutely. You suffered as a unit and felt yourselves erased. It was good for a person to be erased once in a while.
When I read this, I almost gasped. Oh, I thought. So Erin Somers does know! Erin Somers does get it! And yet this timeline, the one in which Cora doesn’t have an affair and instead she and her husband triple down on trad family life, never feels like the real timeline. It’s a blip. And by the end, it’s long forgotten.
I recognized motherhood as an activity to be handled, nothing to dwell upon or lose oneself within.
Which brings me to Lindy West and the polyamory of it all. Though I haven’t read West’s latest memoir, Adult Braces—which chronicles the process of opening up her traditional heterosexual marriage to a third person, a female—the discourse around it was, like the publication of All Fours and the tradwife outrage, seemingly impossible to escape. And from what I’ve read, there is a hint of both phenomena within West’s story. There is All Fours’s road trip as plot device, though West actually completes her drive from Seattle to Florida (and back again), using the time and space, in the words of the Atlantic reviewer, Tyler Austin Harper, “to process her devastation over learning that [her husband] Aham was serious about [his girlfriend] Roya.”
And then when West comes around to fully and happily accept Roya into their marriage, there are also the tradwife-reminiscent accusations of readers who don’t believe West is really happy. That like a dumdum fifties wife, West has been brainwashed into submitting to her husband’s desires. Also from Harper’s review: “[I]n Adult Braces, [West] writes, ‘If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.’”
It all makes me think that maybe, just maybe, Lindy West, Miranda July, the childfree women, the tradwives, and I can find some common ground. Because I believe that what all of us are looking for (excepting the veritable rage baiters) is validation that our version of life is also true and worthwhile. Of course, one interesting distinction is that West, at least, is looking for validation from her readers. I am looking for it among the gatekeepers.
Which reminds me of something West wrote about in an earlier book, Shrill—something that moved me when I read it back in 2016. She spoke of the lack of representation of normal, non-villainous fat people in movies and television. I remember how she made a joke that the sea witch, Ursula, from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, was as good as it got in terms of a plus-size, confident, female role model.
Fast forward to Shrill becoming a TV series, and to West, or a simulacrum of her, becoming the role model.
Not that I endorse ping-ponging from one ideal to another, but I do wonder if it isn’t time for a normie uprising—don’t worry, we’ll do it boringly, responsibly. But what about the other points of view? The writers who consider themselves forward-thinking and inclusive but who have been on the other side of what I want to call the Adult Braces and All Fours spectrum; the writers who have not seemingly felt the need to innovate upon the institution of marriage; the writers who have even been able to find deep meaning and elements of renewal within their highly standard, domestic lives.
Maybe you’re thinking, “But, c’mon! Publishing is a business built on drama and following the trends. These stories are pushing the boundaries. They’re dramatic.” Yes, of course. And what could be more dramatic than a blonde housewife announcing that she is the real anti-capitalist countercultural threat in a sea of polyamorous, rich Democratic socialists who (oddly) send their kids to private schools? (I did clock that the narrator in All Fours has a twenty-minute drive to her child’s school, whereas my kids walk down the street to their underfunded, Title 1, majority-Hispanic elementary school. Go Pandas!)
I do wonder if it isn’t time for a normie uprising—don’t worry, we’ll do it boringly, responsibly.
In another review of Lindy West’s Adult Braces, Helen Lewis posits that West’s memoir marks the end of a specific type of 2010-era feminism. She calls this brand Millennial Feminism and says that perhaps its “greatest hallmark … was how harshly it treated women. We were the ones who were supposed to give up our boundaries, rewrite our sexualities, and defenestrate our heroines. (Oh, so you admire the suffragists for passing the Nineteenth Amendment? Incorrect, they were ‘white feminists.’) And if we were ever fallible, we were supposed to be very, very ashamed.”
It’s this last sentence that resonates the most. I have spent a lot of time feeling ashamed: of disagreeing with my progressive friends; of not having a big career; of the words “stay-at-home mom.” I have routinely asked the question: What happened to you, Amelia? You were on the up and up for a minute there!
At the library, I picked up another literary-fiction heavyweight’s book: Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein. It came out earlier this year, and the library had adorned it with various “In Demand” stickers. It’s another autofictional book. The narrator sounds a lot like Deborah Levy; she is quite taken by Stein and the ways in which she did not fit into her own milieu. Levy describes Stein as “massive when women were supposed to be miniature, an intellectual when women were supposed to be domesticated, queer when she was supposed to be straight.”
There. Did you see it—what Levy did? Massive and miniature are clear antonyms. Ditto, queer and straight. But domesticated and intellectual? Wouldn’t a better antonym for intellectual be “incurious” or “guileless”? What about “vapid”? But no, not for Levy and not for any of the editors who presided over the book’s publication. No, to be domesticated, for so many people in my chosen field, is to be a little bit dumb. A lot unsophisticated.
I go back once more to Lindy West and Virginia Woolf. Lindy West because she had to become her own role model when mainstream culture could only offer her a plus-sized sea witch. And Virginia Woolf because she wrote a literary masterpiece about the inner life of an upper-class housewife.
What happened to me—to answer my own question—is that I fell off trend. Like Stein, I don’t fit into my milieu. But the thing about trends is that they shift. Old ones can return. And maybe in the near future it will be cool and hip to be an educated woman who finds it fascinating to feel herself “erased” or at least subsumed by a standardized version of family life complete with 5 o’clock dinners to account for 6 o’clock soccer practice. Maybe I’ll sell a book titled Something Cunty, Something Used. It will upend the industry. My career will take off and I won’t have time for any of this shit.
Only time will tell.