Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays By Nicole Graev Lipson (Chronicle Books)

In her debut collection, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, Nicole Graev Lipson is unflinching and honest, poetic and learned, intelligent and emotional. Her 12 essays are seasoned with Jewish learning as they explore motherhood’s complexities, challenges and joys, showcasing the author, journalist and essayist’s impressive command of English literature and women’s history.

In one essay, “Tikkun Olam Ted”—named for a book that her son, Jacob, encounters at Hebrew school—Lipson finds the connective tissue between a kabbalistic account of the Creation and the act of parenting. Tikkun olam, as most define it, is the impulse to repair the world, make it a better place, an impulse that momentarily clashes with then 6-year-old Jacob’s rebelliousness.

After a couple of difficult parenting moments, Lipson describes making a welcome turn to Kabbalah through the concept of tzimtzum—that God withdraws from the world to allow Creation to unfold. In Lipson’s talented hands, it becomes a metaphor for parenting, withdrawing to allow your children’s personality and sense of self to unfold.

Tzimtzum is also about the intensity of God’s light, which shattered during Creation, scattering divine sparks throughout the world. Considering the wreckage around us, Lipson observes, “Humans can become God’s co-creators, each of us doing our part to heal the world’s fractures.”

In “The New Pretty,” she talks about her mother’s rhinoplasty, which she had when Lipson was a child, and how her mother chased an elusive idea of beauty. “There are purple-black circles under her eyes, and bars of tape hold a mottled patch of gauze across her nose. It looks as though she’s been punched or pushed from a moving car. But these are wounds of her own choosing—the blood-fringed blooms of a wish long delayed.”

Lipson’s images of violence around the plastic surgery are affecting as she reminds us that the self-inflicted wounds are attempts at achieving beauty, noting the elaborate morning and nighttime skincare routines she herself undergoes in the name of attractiveness and good looks. She quotes the poet Adrienne Rich on the matter. “Like other dominated people, we have learned…to internalize men’s will and make it ours.”

Other essays challenge stereotypes, including “As They Like It,” about grappling with generational changes around gender identity, with the author comparing Shakespeare’s cross-dressing Rosalind with her oldest child, Leigh’s, slow eschewing of things deemed to be of interest and importance to young girls.

Among the essays that resonated with me the most is “Hag of the Deep,” Lipson’s very personal and poignant account of giving her son over to be circumcised. Lipson writes that no one “forced this ceremony on me. …[but] I felt the futile desire to rewind time to the moment I first held his perfect body in my arms and resolved to fight for him.” I’ve never read a more evocative description of what was going through my own mind and soul as my son was carried on a pillow to enter the ancient Jewish covenant.

Like Lipson and Jacob, my son and I rocked in a glider before the ceremony, and all I could think of was how much I wanted to protect him. The author articulates for me, and no doubt other Jewish mothers of sons—perhaps all Jewish mothers— this feeling of inevitability and surrendering. “Inside this room: warm skin, a glistening mouth, a tiny ear, a trickle of milk. Outside it: the flow of four thousand years, sloshing against the door.”

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Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.