Writer Mother Monster: Liz Harmer, “I’m interested in my own desire.”

“I’m interested in my own desire.”
Liz Harmer is the author of The Amateurs and Strange Loops, forthcoming in 2022. She’s a Canadian living in California with her children who are 13, 11, and 8, and describes motherhood in 3 words as “challenge and delight.” Liz came to our interview straight from the ER, and there’s probably a lesson in there about how mothers feel the need to be superwomen, pushing ourselves to exhaustion. She also talks about transgression, mental health, and the evolution of desire.

Writer Mother Monster is an interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice.

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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Liz Harmer

Interview: October 28, 2020

Liz Harmer is a Canadian living in California. Her first novel, The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, was released with Knopf/Vintage in 2019. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published in Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming with Knopf Canada in 2022. Her children are 13, 11, and 8, and here’s how she describes motherhood in 3 words: “Challenge and Delight”

Lara Ehrlich

Hi everybody. Welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, your host, as well as a writer, mother, and monster myself. Joining me today is Liz Harmer. Liz is a Canadian living in California. Her first novel, The Amateurs, is a speculative novel of technological rapture, and it was released with Knopf and Vintage in 2019. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming. We will talk to Liz about all of those things, as well as being a writer mother. Let’s welcome her right now. Hi, Liz.

Liz Harmer

Hello.

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s start by telling us who lives in your house.

Liz Harmer

Well, along with my husband, Adam, there’s Fiona, who’s 13; Simone, who’s 11; Juliet, who’s 8. Sometimes I forget their ages, because they seem to grow up really fast. I also have a dog, two cats, and a bunch of rats. They’re kind of part of the family also.

Lara Ehrlich

Are they your rats or your kids’ rats?

Liz Harmer

Fiona wanted to get a rat, and then the rat got lonely. And then that new rat was pregnant. We had seven, now we have five … you know—cycle of life.

Lara Ehrlich

I won’t ask. Right before the interview, you were telling me that you came here pretty much straight from the ER. So first of all, thank you for joining us. Are you okay?

Liz Harmer

I am okay. I was having a lot of pain and pain with breathing and a lot of symptoms that I couldn’t understand. I just wanted to sleep a lot, and my husband was like, “I think maybe you need to cancel your classes and go in.” I did not cancel my classes. But I tried to squeeze in an ER visit. But anyway, I don’t have COVID, but I might have it now because I was surrounded by people, which was pretty stressful. I had to get an IV. Apparently, I had a really juicy vein that gushed blood everywhere. So that was fun. And anyway, it was a bit of an adventure. I’m sorry if this is too much information about my body. In any case, I’m fine except that I’m exhausted and having some weird pain. It could be an injury. I may have injured myself doing pushups. You’re learning a lot about me right now.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s the point, right? I’m glad you’re okay. But as I said before the interview, you are certainly welcome to postpone this interview. And as we were talking a little bit about how as women, particularly as mothers, we feel like we have to ‘go, go, go’ all the time, even at the expense of our own health, and there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Liz Harmer5:46

Yeah, yeah. I wish I would learn it already. You know, it’s taking me a while.

Lara Ehrlich

Don’t apologize for telling us too much about your personal life. That’s why you’re here. And we’ll get into bodies and women and childbirth, too. I want to start by asking you about the book that’s coming out in 2022.

Liz Harmer

So that book is called Strange Loops, and I’ve been calling it my doomed sex novel for a while. It’s really a book about transgression. There’s a female narrator who basically has an erotic obsession, and she gives into the obsession at the expense of everybody else and ruins her own life and kind of knows she’s ruining it. I’m interested in women who are smart but still doing the wrong thing and know they’re doing the wrong thing. And I’m obviously really interested in obsession and desire. I became very obsessed about desire for about five years, I read everything I could. The book arose out of all of that.

Lara Ehrlich

What was the impetus for that obsession? And then, what research did you do, if you can share?

Liz Harmer

I guess I better get some practice talking about this because the first novel is completely imaginative and not really about anything that I could be accused of being autobiographical, because there are portals and things—even though there was autobiographical stuff, obviously. I’m interested in my own desire, and women having desire feels like this taboo thing that we’re confused about culturally. But also, I was raised in a very strict religious background in the Christian Reformed Church in Canada, which is like a Dutch Calvinist subculture. I felt like the messages I got as a kid and as a teenager didn’t really help me sort out my desire. I’ve been married a long time, but I’m not afraid of talking about desire, being interested in desire. I’m interested in different arrangements, and I became really interested in people who are polyamorous and choosing to live outside of monogamy.

The research that I did was mostly—it’s not really research—I listened to the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet soundtrack while reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and like books like that. I was seeking out a lot of work by people who also were really fascinated by desire. There was this quote that I came across a couple years ago from C.S. Lewis, and it was naming all the loves—I think it’s in a book called The Four Loves—and when he names erotic love, he says, well, erotic love will make you abandon your children and burn down your house and kill your neighbor. I mean, I’m making all of that up. But it was something about what erotic desire can do to us that other kinds of love obviously don’t. And it seems like not super loving to burn down your house and murder your neighbors.

Lara Ehrlich

Maybe not so much.

Liz Harmer

Anyway, those are some of the things I was thinking about. How we can get punished for desire.

Lara Ehrlich

I’m really fascinated by that, too. You tell us you’ve been married for a long time. How long have you been married and tell us about your spouse.

Liz Harmer

Okay, I’m 39. I’ve been married since 22. We just had our 17th anniversary. At 15 years, I started to lose track of the years, but basically our whole adult life. We had a really intense love affair—like, I fell in love with at first sight with him. I met him in the university bookstore where he was looking at all the philosophy books. We were both in the philosophy class. I was like, “Oh, there’s a guy—I’m gonna go talk to him.” So I just insinuated myself into his life for a couple years. And he is now a philosophy professor, which is why we’re in California. He’s continuing to be the man standing in front of the pile of philosophy books, and I continue to be the person who’s going, “Here’s the guy.” We fell madly in love. I was engaged to somebody else briefly. I was from this background where I was an old maid already at 21—not really, but kind of.

Lara Ehrlich

According to your religion?

Liz Harmer

Yeah. I mean, you didn’t have a lot of choices, because you can’t have sex outside of marriage. But you’re full of desire. So, you have to get married in order to have sex. I mean, I’m not saying that’s all it was, but there was a lot of pressure on getting married young. And I feel really bad for naming all of that in my community. I’m sure that’s not true across the board, but I felt a pressure. So, while I was engaged to this other really great guy, I just fell in love with Adam. And that was a bit destructive. That was a bit of a C.S. Lewis “burn down the house” kind of thing. But Adam and I have been together ever since. We’ve been through a lot together. And, yeah, 17 years.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s amazing. And I have to share with you: I met my husband in graduate school, and I think the moment I was drawn to him was when he was reading Ulysses in the student lounge. I went over and I was like, “What section are you reading?” And it was the one in the brothel, and I was like, “Oh, I love that part, where all the prostitutes are hitting on Leopold Bloom.” And he was kinda like, “Huh, who is this girl?” And we’ve been married 15 or 16 years. So, tell me: you have three kids; did you always want to be a mom? Or was it something that snuck up on you?

Liz Harmer

I don’t know if I always wanted to be a mom. There were times when I was a kid when I was envisioning my future having children, and there were other times when my dream life for myself was that I would live nomadically without any ties and I would just be a “writer” and travel and have lovers and not have children.

Lara Ehrlich

Capital ‘W’ writer.

Liz Harmer

Yes, exactly. I never had a strong image of what my future would be, except that I wanted lots of romantic, bohemian situations, which, I didn’t know how to get those. There was no path, like “this way toward Bohemia.” I just wore black turtlenecks. I had Fiona when I was 26. The decision when we got married was very impulsive. I was planning to be an academic. And I was like, well, am I going to have children during grad school? How am I going to have children while I’m on the tenure track? How, while job searching? None of them seemed possible. And I think this must have been something I internalized, that I thought I was so old, at 26, to start a family, when what I found out was I was the youngest mom around. Every other mom that I met was in their 30s, for the most part. So basically: “I can’t make up my mind, and I can’t stop thinking about it; let’s give it a go.” And then, that’s what happened. It was very impulsive. We kind of just do that. And then the chips fall and hopefully we can manage. I guess that’s how we live.

Lara Ehrlich

I have so many questions to ask you about this because it’s so different from my own experience. And it’s just fascinating to see how people make those decisions about their families. But first, as somebody who was looking for that nomadic life, which really resonates with me, I wanted to have a love affair with a gypsy under the moon and ride off on a horse, like fairy tales, and all these things were part of my dream for myself. And at least for me, like with you, there was no road sign to nomadic life. And I won’t say that I settled or that you settled because I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. But it’s very different than the nomadic lifestyle, to have been married for more than 15 years and have children. How do you reconcile those two diverse paths—the nomadic side of you, the wild side, and the married mother of three, who lives, I assume, in a home with pots and pans and a refrigerator and very unromantic things?

Liz Harmer

Yes, that’s a good question. I’m not sure. I mean, I just thought I was going to be Leonard Cohen. I’m like, maybe I could be him. That’s my top choice. And then I had no other options. How do I reconcile myself to this? Well, I guess I try to have an interesting and rich life from where I am. I do believe passionately that you can have an interesting, rich, not boring, settled, domestic life, just because you have a boring, settled, domestic life. I try to say yes to things, I try to meet lots of people, I do things that scare me a lot. I probably work a lot of it out in my writing by letting my characters do the thing I can’t do myself or that I’m afraid to do. I guess that’s how I do it.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s a great segue to writing and how you use personal experience in writing. Blair Hurley and I, in the last episode, were talking about how women’s work or women’s writing is very much seen as autobiographical, even if it’s not, so people say, “Where are you in the story?”—which is not something that people typically ask men. So when you say that you work out some of these issues in your writing, I hesitate to say, “What’s autobiographical about your writing?” But I will ask: where do you see this coming into play in your books, whether it’s The Amateurs or the forthcoming book and/or the memoir? You’re working on a memoir, right?

Liz Harmer

Yeah, the memoir is the sort of the next thing. The origin of The Amateurs, which is a sci-fi, speculative kind of a book, was that I was worried that I was going to screw up my marriage in some way that I couldn’t fix. So, I kept writing about this character who kept screwing up her marriage and then realizing it was the worst mistake of her life. At some point in this process, I found out that there was a time machine, and what if she could go back and fix it? And then, of course, you can’t. So, I was working out some things with that. I guess it has to do with the narrative of your own life, which is that I believe my husband and I are incredibly well-suited to each other and that our love story was really intense. A lot of these narratives bolster that that narrative, right? Like “this is the one true love.”

With Strange Loops, it’s a lot darker. I also wrote this novel that I’m trying to turn into short stories, which was quite autobiographical in certain ways, because it’s about people who lose their faith and have boxed themselves into a corner with their choices. And then, they no longer believe in the things that made them make those choices. They’re Christians who decided not to use birth control and ended up with a lot of children and then were like, “Whoa, this is not the life I wanted,” too late.

I think that the way that autobiography works for me is that the ideas I’m interested in become things I’m trying to sort out. The characters are not always very close to me or the way that I think or the way that I am. And, in fact, I thought that my main character was based on myself in The Amateurs, but I found out recently that it’s actually more like my husband, which I was kind of shocked by.

Then the memoir. The one thing that happened to me that was very life-changing was that I had a huge psychotic episode when I was in high school, and I was hospitalized. It kind of threw my plans into disarray. I’ve been writing about that experience of mental illness and how I deal with mental illness, trying to be honest about all of that, how my family system is involved, how my faith was involved. So obviously, that sets really deep. I try not to be afraid to see myself in my writing. I don’t think you can avoid yourself coming into your writing. But that doesn’t mean that I’m writing about myself.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, characters can be very different from you but still drawn from something deep inside you, I think, or something you’re struggling with. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Tell me a little bit more about your kids. And I’ll share with you that I wasn’t sure I always wanted to be a mother. It was something I thought long and hard about. I had my daughter when I was 35, I think, and I have one child. It was something that I told my husband very early on when we were dating, that if I never want to have children, are you okay with that? And he said yes. And then we were married for six years before we had a child. So, throughout those six years, he started to feel like maybe he wanted to have a child, and I wasn’t sure. What would that do to my career or my writing career? I felt very much that writing—with the capital “W,” as you said—is a solitary act that demands commitment, and that children might ruin that commitment. So, finally, it was like, “Well, we’re either gonna do it now or never because the clock is ticking.” So I had my child. It’s very interesting to hear you say that it was much more organic. Like, it was kind of like, let’s do this, it’s a life choice, and we’ll see what comes of it. So tell me a bit more about that—and then having two more children! Tell me what life is like with three kids—because with one, I’m a little crazy.

Liz Harmer

Uh, yes, it has not been easy. During the time that we were having our kids, my husband was in a Ph.D. program the entire time, and I was working part-time or trying to be a writer. At some point, I gave up all of my jobs so that I could be a stay-at-home mother. I got really crunchy for a little while, like I was breastfeeding two children at once. Just thinking about all the phases I went through having three kids, I had a very serious postpartum depression after the second. We didn’t have any money, I didn’t think we had any prospects, I didn’t think Adam could get a job as a philosophy professor … so it was really tough for a while.

And now it’s fun. They’re all just running around, and they live their lives. And our parenting philosophy is pretty much like, “We love them; I hope they’re okay.” We don’t have the energy or money to put a ton of resources into turning them into whatever. I don’t know what the middle-class dream is for a child, but I guess getting them into the right school so they can get the right job so that they can get married and have a house with all that stuff that you’re supposed to want. And none of that stuff is possible for us. So, we’ve just decided we don’t want it because you can’t have it anyway. No, we just let our kids be, and so that’s easier, I think. So right now, it’s easy. We’re in the Golden Age.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, and I want to come back and talk about advice for people who are struggling right now with younger kids. Like Blair, who we saw last time, has a daughter who is seven months old, and she’s right in the throes of it. Can we talk about mental health for a second? You mentioned postpartum depression and in high school having a psychotic break. Tell me about your experience as a woman, first of all, with mental health and then as a mother and whether you were taken seriously and what support there was for you. If we could talk about writing too and how this how this may impact your writing or play out in your writing, but start with just tell us about what it was like.

Liz Harmer

The postpartum depression that I suffered was one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through, because when I was depressed before, you can sleep all day, you can indulge your depression. You feel a certain permission to be dark. But you can’t do that when you have a baby. So, the spiral that you get into of guilt and rage—the guilt turns into rage, and you’re so tired. I just didn’t get enough sleep. I am very sensitive to lack of sleep. When I had two babies under two, I was breastfeeding both of them, I was probably anemic, and I had a really traumatic birth with my second daughter and my eldest daughter was having night terrors like three nights a week, and I was getting no sleep. I think that I was really set up for a disaster.

And so, with my third daughter, we prepared better for that. And I didn’t fall into that depression again. But it was really bad. And I didn’t see it coming. My belief had always been that because I had gone through an incredible mental health crisis, how could that happen again? Because I would see it coming, and I would be able to stop it. And in this case, it got on top of me and I couldn’t stop it. By the time I realized I was depressed, I’d been six months depressed and just kind of white-knuckling it. And that was really, really rough. I’m really glad that’s over.

Lara Ehrlich

I hear you saying that for the third birth you prepared in advance, and that you didn’t let yourself go there, and it sounds as though you’re taking the responsibility for something that really is a chemical. Is that a message that you heard from people? Did you have support in getting through this? Did you have medical doctors believe you when you said, “I’m suffering”?

Liz Harmer

I am really grateful that you asked me that question, because I need to give some context. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 17 or 18, and I rejected my diagnosis and went off my meds. Most people do that, because it’s horrible to be on. It’s really hard to be on those meds. It’s hard to get them right. And so, I had been for a long time expecting to have another mental illness, you know, a manic episode. And then I just never did. But anytime I need psychiatric help, they know that, and they know that I am not on medication. I had this really great psychiatrist, and there was this women’s health concerns clinic in Hamilton, where I lived in Canada. And she knew that I wasn’t medicated but that I was vulnerable, chemically vulnerable, to all kinds of things.

So, what I mean by prepared is that she prepared everything she could for me, so that I wouldn’t have those chemical exacerbations, like lack of sleep. Certain things that we did had to do with lifestyle stuff in order to give me the best chance, without going to the medication. Partly because if you have a history of bipolar, if you have a history of mania, they don’t want to put you on antidepressants, because that can cause a manic episode. So, you don’t really have the option of going on SSRIs in the same way. Anyway, that’s the context. I didn’t mean to sound like I was blaming myself, although I probably was a little bit, like I knew that I was taking on too much. And I couldn’t stop myself. I often was looking for someone to stop me from ruining my own life, you know?

Lara Ehrlich

I think that’s a really relatable feeling, mental health notwithstanding, just with women and particularly with mothers that sense that you need to be responsible and in control and that if something spirals beyond your control, it’s somehow your fault, and then you need to work harder to rein it in. It’s a self-defeating cycle, I think.

Liz Harmer

The point is, I actually did have support, but I also didn’t. I also was in a community. I was in the attachment parenting community, and I don’t know if that’s still a big thing.

Lara Ehrlich

I know I’ve heard of it, but describe attachment parenting for people who don’t know.

Liz Harmer

Well, there’s this book called The Baby Book. And actually, this doctor is also an anti-vaxxer, I think. I got involved with a lot of moms who were really into natural parenting, which meant slings, co-sleeping, breastfeeding until the child decides not to breastfeed anymore. And a lot of that stuff was really beneficial for us. But a lot of it put a lot of pressure on me to just give everything over to my baby. I think the message that I was getting as a mother was, “I’m suffering. I can’t even walk a kilometer because I’m so depleted.” And I’m just like, “Gotta keep breastfeeding.” Nobody’s there saying you don’t. Some social worker was finally like, “You know, you’re allowed to wean them.” Which was nice. Finally. But there was a line that says something like, this is such a short time in your baby’s life—like who are you to not give everything to them, basically. It was in the context of sexual desire, like if, when you’re breastfeeding, you don’t feel like having sex, well, too bad, because this is just five years of your life or whatever. I was breastfeeding and pregnant for 10 years. I mean, that’s a long time. I’ve learned a lot.

Lara Ehrlich

No, but those messages are so ingrained, so deeply ingrained, I think, in motherhood that you have to give yourself wholly to that little person. And yes, in part you do, because they are vulnerable and they can’t exist in the world without their parents—I won’t say “their mother,” because the father can give a baby formula and they’ll be fine. But the message that we hear is that the mother is the one keeping that child alive, and the nourishment comes directly from you. But not just the nourishment. Breast milk has the antibodies, and you’re keeping them safe from germs. You’re their world. And there’s a lot of pressure, particularly when you don’t know what you’re doing, like with the first baby. For me having one and only one baby, you don’t have anything to compare it to. You can’t anticipate what it’s going to be like. It’s a lot of pressure.

Liz Harmer

Yeah. And I think that Dr. Sears, who wrote The Baby Book, sort of thought this was magical, like mothers were magical. And if you only do this, your baby will never have a tantrum. And they’ll always have such a sense of rightness. It was really dogmatic, and I really bought into it. I thought, well, I’ll just invest now. And then I watch it later.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. And then when your child doesn’t conform to that, because no baby conforms, and you’re like, what am I doing wrong? So what messages did you hear about motherhood as a writer before you became a mother? I’ll share with you what mine were later, but what did you anticipate your life as a writer mother would be?

Liz Harmer

I was in a Ph.D. program, and I thought I was somehow going to be an academic, a novelist, and a mother. I realized I wasn’t able to do all of that—or didn’t want to have to do all of that. I felt like it would be so easy to just be a writer and a mother. I wouldn’t have to also be an academic. Honestly, I don’t really remember getting messages. I was very supported by my parents in this desire to be a writer. And sometimes when I hear people saying their parents don’t want them to be a writer, I couldn’t understand. One of our hypotheses, my husband and I, is that because I went through this experience in high school, where everybody’s just kind of crossing their fingers, hoping you’re going to be okay—and maybe you’re not going to be okay or have a normal life it kind of sets you free to just experiment with your life, because no one expects anything from you or something. I don’t know. That’s one hypothesis. My answer is I don’t know what my messages were. I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time, but I also was so bullheaded, I was just like, I’m going to do this anyway. So, tell me about your messages.

Lara Ehrlich

Good for you. I remember this book Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed that came out the year before I decided to get pregnant. It was a book of essays from famous female writers who decided not to have children. And so, it’s like, okay, that just confirms the fact that you can’t be a great writer—with a capital “W” and a mother with a capital “M”—that you’re going to have to skimp on one in order to succeed in the other. I grew up with a mother who was a capital “M” mother. And I felt like that’s what you had to do to be a great mother: you had to be a Mother. To be a great writer, you have to be a writer first, and there’s no room for negotiation there. So, it was very hard to decide that I was going to try to do both and have a full-time job on top of it. You have teaching and writing and motherhood and you’re trying to balance all of those things. It’s very hard. And so how do you do that? You are a professor, a teacher, you have three children, and you’ve written a number of books. How do you balance it?

Liz Harmer

Okay, well, I will tell you, this is the most practical advice I ever got: I think I was pregnant with my third daughter at the time, and I was working a lot of hours in the summer at the library and my husband was working on his Ph.D. And also, I was learning how to drive a stick, which is really stressful for me. I kept stalling. I just was like, I can’t write this summer. I’m just done. I can’t. This is too much to add to my life. I’m allowed to not write. But then I met Richard Bausch, who ended up being kind of a mentor for me. He has this list of advice for young writers, and one of them was learn how to write in every situation. And he described lying on the couch with a baby on his chest and writing with a pencil because then it doesn’t run out of ink. And while I’ve never done that, because that was really awkward for me, I did learn to not have precious writing time, but just to be writing all the time. The downside is that I don’t have a lot of boundaries around work in life now. Just a little bit every day adds up to a lot.

Lara Ehrlich

I hear you on that. And thank you, Nan Cohen, for supplying the title of the book I was thinking of: Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, by Meghan Daum. Those are the words that resound in our skulls when we try to do things like writing, which is such a personal venture, it’s selfish and shallow and self-absorbed. But also, those words, I guess, are for people who aren’t mothers and feel like they’re making that choice because they are too selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed to have families. I guess it goes both ways. But this is a podcast about motherhood. So, we’ll do it from our perspective.

Liz Harmer

One thing I do want to say about that is that I remember this calculation that I did when my kids were young, which was that I wasn’t raising my three daughters just so they could have more children. Like what is the point of life? What is the point of anyone’s life? I wanted to model for them that you could have more things in life than just a family. Family was important, and you love the people that are near to you, but also, you have to invest in yourself, because I want them to do that. So that was something I thought about a lot because I just started to get a lot of like generational despair, over just creating generations, and then they’re going to create generations, and what is the point?

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me about writing as a mother of three girls. Do they see you writing? Where do you write? Do they know what you’re doing? Have they read your books?

Liz Harmer

They do see me writing all the time. They know. And often, I’m just a bad mother, and I’m like, “Get lost, because I’m writing.” They know that I go and do writer retreats and things like that. It’s a really big part of my identity. My 11-year-old is now writing a novel and multiple stories. And the other day, she was like, “I could just drop out of school and be a novelist, couldn’t I?” And so, she has absorbed some of that, I think, although she would claim that I have no influence. She tried to start reading my book the other day, but I think I use pretty difficult vocabulary and concepts. So, they’re not quite reading the novel yet, but it’s something that Adam really supports. He values my time to write, and the kids know that’s valuable to me. It’s pretty long-standing, at this point.

Lara Ehrlich

How do you communicate to your kids that it’s important to you?

Liz Harmer

Um, “Get lost kids—doing important stuff now”? I don’t know. I guess I just carve out time, and I tell them not to interrupt me when it’s that time.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Which leads us to the fact that you mentioned earlier: the kids are older now. But for people who have really young kids, whether it’s one or two or three kids, how different is it now that your kids are little older than when it was back when they were like 2, 3, 4, or 5, when they’re a lot more demanding of your time.

Liz Harmer

I remember all kinds of different phases of this. When I had one child and was pregnant with a second, I got into a routine, where every Saturday I went out to a coffee shop, and that was my write time. The rest of the time, when I had free time, I would write. So I would be using that time to write and to think about literary community and all of that stuff. But then I would just sit down and write one story on the weekends, or maybe fix up a story. And it started to feel like that wasn’t enough time.

And so later, I “negotiated”—I’m using a lot of air quotes because it’s not like Adam’s difficult to negotiate with—but we rearranged our schedule, so that I could have two hours every morning out of the house. We were in a cramped apartment with two screaming children. I couldn’t write while I was with those screaming children. So, I would go across the street to the coffee shop, and he would be in charge of the kids. And that was two or three hours every day, say from 8 to 10, 8 to 11. And because he was a student, he could work around that. And that was a lot of hours a week—that adds up to a lot. Actually, that seemed like a lot more than I have now.

And I remember when I was kind of holed up with Juliet, who’s my youngest, kind of protecting that time, that postnatal time, sitting on a bed while she was beside me sleeping, and I was writing. So, I would just steal the time that I could. I think that because we had our kids young, and Adam found this too, it looks absurd. When you look at what we were doing, him being a full-time student, me trying to write while having all these kids, it looks absurd. But because we had started that young, time was so precious, we didn’t waste it. I actually feel like now I waste a lot more time. And I feel a lot more guilty about the time that I waste. Because, you know, suddenly I’ll look around, and nobody actually needs me at this moment. I could probably do the dishes. Oh, that’s the other thing. I don’t have a tidy house. And I never will. And I had to reconcile myself to that. I’m just not going to tidy my house very much.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, there are always things that you have to kind of give up, right? Like, give up control over, whether it’s your house or your lawn care or something. But when you were taking those two hours a week, did you feel guilty? If not, that’s awesome. If you did, how did you get past it?

Liz Harmer

That seemed like a very small amount of time. I don’t even think I went out to get haircuts or go shopping or anything. I didn’t do anything for myself, besides those two hours. I don’t think I really felt guilty at that time. The way I constantly try to not feel guilty is to remind myself that it’s important that my kids see me as a person. I think it’s important for parents to not be the servants of their children. They need to learn to be on their own in the world, slowly, and it’s important that they understand that we’re also human beings who have needs and boundaries. Whenever I feel guilty, I think, “No, I’m teaching them good boundaries.” I guess I’m really skilled at defense mechanisms, where I tell myself I’m doing okay.

Lara Ehrlich

It sounds like you’re doing great to me. I think those are all really valuable mantras to keep repeating to ourselves. And thank you Becky Kirk, who says, “Liz, you and Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t have tidy houses. So, you’re in good company. You have more important things to do.”

Liz Harmer

I wish my house was tidy.

Lara Ehrlich

Talk a little bit then about raising daughters, specifically. I have a daughter myself, so we touched on the example you want to provide for your kids—that you’re not their servant, that you have things that are important to you. But as the mother of daughters, what messages do you want them to receive that maybe you didn’t, as a young girl?

Liz Harmer

For a long time, my answer to this was that I felt I didn’t feel pretty as a kid and I wanted my mother to tell me I was pretty. And also, we didn’t like vanity in our religious subculture, and I felt confused about that. So, I was like, “I’m gonna tell my daughters they’re pretty.” That was gonna be my thing. But now the tables have turned, and my kids think that I’m vain, and they’re annoyed about that. They don’t value that at all. I guess my work is done there.

I want my daughters to grow up with a very healthy relationship with sexuality. I don’t want them to think there’s anything shameful or bad about sexuality. I want them to be able to freely explore sexually. So that’s really important to me. That’s a value that I feel strongly about. And I guess my kids don’t seem to want to be mothers right now. I don’t know what I’m doing in that regard. I’m really proud of them. They seem to have minds of their own, thinking through things in their own way, and Adam and I both value that. So, I don’t know what else I could ask for them. That’s what I want for them.

Lara Ehrlich

No, that’s great. I think to small kids, and even to teenagers and 20-something women, certainly to me, motherhood seemed really terrifying. I remember my 4-year-old asked where babies come from, and I explained childbirth to her. And she’s like, “No, I don’t want to do that. No, I’m not gonna be a mother.” I was like, “I don’t blame me.” Like, that is kind of terrifying.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, I think because I was young and fumbling and bumbling my way through everything, sometimes I’ll tell the kids things that I did, like I tell them their birth story, and they’ll be like, “Why would you do that? Why would you make that so hard on yourself? Why mom?!” Anyway, so yeah.

Lara Ehrlich

Do you have advice for people with smaller children right now? And in a second, we’ll talk about the pandemic and how that changes things. But with the pandemic aside, people who have young kids and are trying to make their way as writers, what would you advise?

Liz Harmer

I don’t want to be like, “Well, just claim your time,” because it’s not culturally possible to do that. I acknowledge that part of the reason I claim my time is because my husband doesn’t give me a hard time about that. So, my answer is I don’t know what to do in terms of your time, however, one piece of advice that I got that was that was really helpful to me was that everything’s easier after the youngest child is 5. It feels endless. You look at the rest of your life, and it just feels like responsibility and difficulty. And you do have this responsibility, but the various things that make it so hard when your kids are young and so much more challenging do get easier. And things get a little bit more fun. And also, you’re more rested.

It was important to me to not get overwhelmed by my ambition. When you haven’t written anything, a book looks really long. How are you gonna finish a book? I got into a routine that was useful to me, which was “I’m just going to finish a story. And then I’m going to finish another story. And then maybe I’ll edit those. And then I’ll slowly get to a third story.” As time passes, you end up with 15 or 20 stories. The habit perpetuates itself.

Lara Ehrlich

You don’t have to do it all at once.

Liz Harmer

And I guess, also you forget everything. When I look back, it wasn’t that long ago that my kids were young. But it feels like a different country that I used to live in.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily get easier; it just changes and that the time you have changes and the things you want to write about change. It’s not really that frightening expanse of future that is going to be exactly the same as it is right now. When your kids are young and you have no time and you’re exhausted.

Liz Harmer

I don’t know if that’s helpful, because I just made decisions. I was too afraid to make them. So I just made them like; I just went for it. And that’s probably not the best way to live. But that’s what we did.

Lara Ehrlich

My husband and I are the opposite: we over-plan and overthink things because fear holds us back. And then finally, it’s kind of like, we either have to do something or not do something and we’re forced to a decision. So, I think either one has its problems, but its benefits as well.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, when I look back 13 years ago—my oldest daughter just turned 13—all those years ago, I didn’t have a smartphone. And naptime was reading time, and it was so quiet in my soul. Actually, what was has been a harder thing for me with writing is all of the infiltration of social media technology into my brain and eroding my time. And my attention. I look back and it looks like I had a lot more mental space.

Lara Ehrlich

I think a lot of people feel that too. I definitely feel it. You sit down to write and then you’re like, “I wonder what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter.” So, not to get too heavy here, but how has quarantine and isolation changed the dynamic of your family and your writing time?

Liz Harmer

The pandemic has been really hard for us. Our kids have been home from school since middle of March, and that has been unrelenting. We don’t have family around. And so, we don’t have people to help with child care, although our oldest daughter is getting old enough to help out with that, but there’s not a lot of privacy. I know my husband who’s extremely introverted is struggling with overstimulation and feeling crowded. He’s doing a lot of helping with homework, the kids are constantly needing something, the messes are worse, they need food all the time, constantly having to feed these children. Um, you know, they need help with their technology.

Meanwhile, like I’m teaching three mornings a week, two afternoons a week online, he’s in two other days in his office recording Zoom, or doing Zoom teaching, and it just doesn’t feel like we can get off this ride. Like when is it going to get easier? I’m trying to be okay with the fact that I’m not getting a lot of writing done right now and to treat this as a fallow time, but it doesn’t really feel fallow so much is just full of other junk that I have to do. I don’t really feel well unless I’m writing, oo I’m trying to write a little bit, but it’s actually the worst for my writing that I’ve ever experienced, even when our kids were little.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people. Also, just the anxiety of the situation is always in the background, even if we’ve kind of learned to live with it, it’s there. Much less the situation of living in close proximity with your kids and your spouse, and there’s no breathing room there and everything has been upended. When you say that you’re finding time, or making time to do some writing, even if it’s like small pieces, how are you doing it?

Liz Harmer55:28

So one thing I’m doing for self-care is walking my dog every morning. On the mornings I don’t teach, I walk the dog without my smartphone. I just walk outside. I let that be a time of collecting my thoughts and letting my ideas stew. And then I’m just taking notes here and there on the things that I’m working on.

And then probably scheduling, like two to three hours a week of writing time. I Skype with a good friend once a week on Thursday afternoons, and we write while the Skype is on. That is a really precious time. Sometimes when somebody else is keeping you accountable, or somebody else also doing it, you feel permission to do it. On Saturday, when I should have probably been mopping the floors or whatever, I just had a burning urge to work on this novel that I’ve been working on. And I just shut the door. And I was like, I need a few hours. And everybody kind of respects that because it’s longstanding at this point.

Lara Ehrlich

I think there’s a lot there. I love the idea of those Skype writing dates and holding each other accountable.

Liz Harmer

It also just makes you feel close to the other person in a nice way.

Lara Ehrlich

It’s a great point that we don’t have to write every day to be writers. Elizabeth McCracken, who’s a mother and a successful writer told me, “Anybody who says you have to write every day as a man.” You grow up with that message that you need to write every day. And it has to be like, between 5 AM and 1 in the afternoon and then you drink whiskey and smoke a cigar and go back to writing.

Liz Harmer

I heard that John Cheever put on a three-piece suit to bring his kids to school, got home, took everything off, and was naked drinking and writing all day. And then put the three-piece suit back on. The facts don’t sound right.

Lara Ehrlich

And Stephen King wrote on an ironing board in the back of his trailer. And it’s like, really? His wife was making dinner while he got to like go sit and write on an ironing board.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, that’s right. But we don’t have anyone around here making the dinner. Yeah, that’s the problem here. This is another hot tip: apple slices, peanut butter, and cheese sandwiches are perfectly nutritious enough. You don’t have to make elaborate meals, you can just serve kids a pile of things.

Lara Ehrlich

My four-year-old eats popsicles three times a day. They’re fruit, right?

Liz Harmer

I think it’s perfect. No guilt.

Lara Ehrlich

As long as they’re like fed and you know, relatively clean. Relatively.

Liz Harmer

Hopefully they’ll figure out how to be clean later.

Lara Ehrlich

We have a comment here from Natalie McAlister Jackson, who says, “Listening to you talk about motherhood and writing makes me feel so human. Thank you for sharing.” I’ll say the same: It definitely it makes me feel human and like I’m not alone in this weird venture that we’ve embarked upon. We’ve hit the hour mark, but I want to ask Liz, if there’s anything we haven’t covered yet or that you wanted to talk about or any messages you wanted to relay to people out here who are listening? And if not, that’s okay.

Liz Harmer

I don’t think I have anything else to say. I hope I haven’t exposed myself in the most awkward way possible.

Lara Ehrlich

I think I think you’ve exposed yourself just enough! I think it’s really great to be open and brave and talk about some of these things. I really appreciate it.

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & RESOURCES

Liz Harmer’s website
https://www.lizharmer.com/

Liz’s Books

· The Amateurs (Penguin Random House, 2019)
https://www.lizharmer.com/work/moment-53tz6

· Strange Loops (Knopf Canada, 2022)
https://www.lizharmer.com/work/circuit-txlms

Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann (1996)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117509/

A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes (1978)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374532314

Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998)

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/eros-the-bittersweet/

The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis (Harvest Books, 1960)