Writer Mother Monster: Blair Hurley, “It’s a powerful desire to become.”

“It’s a powerful desire to become.”
Blair Hurley is the author of the novel, The Devoted, and lives in Canada with her husband and 7-month-old daughter. Blair shares her joy in new motherhood and her eagerness to see how this shift in her identity will play out in her writing. She explores the difference between sentiment and sentimentality in writing, why we pass judgement on transgressive women characters, and writing on a thin edge between tenderness and viciousness.

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

Transcript

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

Guest: Blair Hurley

Interview: October 22, 2020

Blair Hurley is the author of The Devoted, published in 2018 from W.W. Norton & Company, and her stories are published in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She’s also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and scholarships from Breadloaf and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center. She received her AB from Princeton University and her MFA from NYU, and she lives in Canada, near Toronto, with her husband and daughter.

Lara Ehrlich  

Hi everybody. Welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, and today’s guest is Blair Hurley. Blair is the author of The Devoted, published in 2018 from W.W. Norton & Company, and her stories are published in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She’s also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and scholarships from Breadloaf and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center. She received her AB from Princeton University and her MFA from NYU, and she lives in Canada, near Toronto, with her husband and daughter. Welcome, Blair.

Blair Hurley  

Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you, Lara.

Lara Ehrlich  

You, too, Blair. Now, we met probably five years ago now at Breadloaf, before either of us were parents, or had published books. It’s great to meet here in this virtual space as both writers and mothers. To start, can you tell us who lives in your house?

Blair Hurley  

It’s funny. I’m such a new mother that the title is still something that I’m getting used to. But I live in a suburb of Toronto with my husband and our seven-month-old baby girl. And a couple of cats, as well.

Lara Ehrlich  

Can’t forget the cats. You were telling me, just before we started, that your daughter’s crawling now, right?

Blair Hurley   

Yes. Everyone told me that that would be one of those milestones where you had your life before that, and then, forget about having a life after that. It’s true that before that point, you can just kind of put a baby down on a mat somewhere and walk away and they’ll be there when you get back. But that’s not true anymore. She’s very much underfoot, all over, which is exciting and great. I’m so happy and delighted about it, but it does sort of ratchet up your alertness to another level, where you feel like you have to be constantly monitoring.

Lara Ehrlich  

Definitely. I used to put my daughter in a little basket by the couch. It was a basket with handles, and I could move her around the apartment and just sit and write next to her.

Blair Hurley   

There was this pillow that I would put her on, right next to my computer, and she would just sort of smile up at me and I’d smile back, and it was very, very cozy. But now she’s just too busy. She would roll right off that pillow. She’s on the move.

Lara Ehrlich  

What were your expectations of motherhood before you became a mother?

Blair Hurley   

Wow, there are so many things. Motherhood is such a huge, powerful identity in our culture and in our literature and in our lives that it’s nerve-racking to approach it yourself and to consciously make the decision to become this identity.I love the name of your series, Writer Mother Monster, because I think there are all these epic elements of motherhood. I definitely thought a lot about my relationship with my mother, of course. I was very close with my mother. She passed away more than five years ago now. And we just had a wonderful relationship. There was never any one clear moment where I could put my finger on why she was a good mother—or, you know, what were the things she was doing that made her a good mother? It was so hard to quantify. 

And yet, thinking back, it was in 1,000 small decisions, every day, to be present with me, to be interested in what I was interested in, to show me caring when I needed it—all these thousands of little decisions. And in retrospect, it feels like she made the right decision every time. So I felt very nervous going into it, thinking, “How could I do that? How could I make the right decision every day, 1,000 times a day, without ever making the wrong decision?” 

It feels that way, right? Like that, as a mother, you have to make the right decision every time. You have to get it right every time and choose to be the good mother with every decision. And so, I felt a lot of trepidation, for sure, heading into that decision to become a mother. 

My expectations of motherhood were that, yes, it would be tough, and there would be all these decisions to make. I had a vague sense of how tired you might get. You can have people tell you you’ll be tired, but it doesn’t really mean anything until you experience it. Another thing that a couple of parents told me is that you’ll be so sleep-deprived in those first couple of months that they’ll go by in a blur and you won’t remember them after this. That has been true a little bit. But there’s a lot of time there. I’m not sure what I was doing—so your memories are not that strong those first couple of months. Things got much better as time went on, when we started to find our routine and just kind of understand our baby better and better. I think that happens, where it’s not just a generic baby; it’s your child, and you start to learn what your child needs better and better. So yeah, my explanation is a long, rambling way of saying that my expectations were that it will be difficult and tiring. But it doesn’t really mean anything until you experience it.

Lara 

There’s no way to prepare for it, right? People tell you, you can get a dog, but it’s not the same thing.

Blair Hurley 

It’s not. And that’s okay, because you’re also learning every day, and you get a little bit better every day. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have bad days, but you learn more and more about what to do right each day. So, there is a learning curve, and you start to understand better with each day, so you feel more in control, as well. In the first month, in particular, I felt sort of out of control. You’re learning so many things you have to keep in mind, at the same time you’re recovering from a major biological event and you’re exhausted. It seems particularly cruel to me that you have to learn to care for an infant at exactly the time you’ve been injured in a way physically, and you have to recover. The fact that it all happens at once—it’s tough. It’s a tough time, for sure.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, absolutely. Did you always know you wanted to be a mother and/or a writer? Do you have strong sense of one or the other or both?

Blair Hurley  

I had a strong sense from a young age that I wanted to be a writer. From age eight, I was writing stories, and it was always part of my dreaming about myself, my sense of self. I only felt whole and complete and content when I had written, and I couldn’t go long without feeling irritable if I hadn’t written. So, writing has been a part of my identity since I was very young. The idea of being a mother, though, I think, was something that I mostly avoided thinking about. I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a mother. It was something that was very much a question mark, and I was open to what the adult version of me might want for herself. 

I had a very liberal, feminist upbringing, and the focus there is to value your career and your ambitions and put motherhood aside. It’s sometimes looked down upon if that’s your only ambition, to be a mother, and that’s an unfortunate conflict, the idea that a feminist can’t want to be a mother and see it as a value—meaning you can really be a feminist parent. That’s something that I absolutely wanted for my vision of parenthood. But I didn’t know how to do it. When I thought about motherhood as a young woman, in my teens and 20s, I thought I should focus entirely on my career and not really think too hard about parenthood, because I somehow got the impression that it wasn’t feminist to long to be a mother.

Have you had that impression? If you think back to the messages that we received, well-meaning messages about encouraging girls to have a focus on careers and valuing career, I don’t think there was a lot of talk about, “Oh, and when you’re there, you’ll feel this way.”

Lara Ehrlich  

I think you’re right. And I wonder how much of that is a response to the generation before us, to our mother’s generation, when women were encouraged to get married and become mothers, and that was the identity that they grew up believing was theirs to inherit. And so, in pushing back against that, a whole generation of women who said, “We can focus on our careers, we can be empowered to be feminists, and you want something more than domesticity?” Maybe it went a little too far?

Blair Hurley  

It’s unfortunate to put these two things in conflict with each other. One problem I have with the “having it all” myth is the idea that motherhood and career are two things, and that you have to somehow add motherhood and career onto your life, when really, there should be some way for these roles to complement each other and to be part of your life—to be a writer, to be a mother, to be both instead of piling more burdens onto yourself. 

I’m glad that my school and my family encouraged my career and my growth as a feminist, as a self-reliant person, but I also wish, in a wistful way, that there was some sort of class I could have taken or model I could have seen about becoming a parent. Almost like the way a lot of adults say they wish there had been a class they could have taken in high school about how to do their taxes or these other practical life things. That would be great to have a model for a parenting class. I know some schools do have them. I don’t know if I would support it or not. But I do, at least on a very personal level, feel this kind of gap, this emptiness around what sort of parent I was supposed to be or what sort of skills I was supposed to know. I feel like everything I’ll be saying to you tonight, Lara, will have the caveat that I have the benefit of literally seven months of experience. I don’t have a lot of worldly wisdom around parenting yet. I don’t know that you ever feel that way. I’m not sure.

Lara Ehrlich  

I don’t think you do. And honestly, I think it’s great that you have the experience that you have. This series is for women of all stages of motherhood and of writing. Seven months is just as valid a mother as seven years and 17 years. Your experience as a mother is very valid.

Blair Hurley   

Thank you. We haven’t even mentioned how the pandemic adds to the burdens of all parents these days. It felt particularly odd with the timing for me, because I gave birth literally two days before the borders closed between the U.S. and Canada. And so, when I had a baby, the world was different. We’ve been pretty much in social isolation since then, just trying to do the right thing about being safe and not really socializing or meeting other moms or getting the benefit of our local community. We’re just trying to pretty much hold up. Both my husband and I have felt like we’re on our own. It’s just the two of us raising a baby and figuring out how to do it and learn. So, it feels particularly isolating that I haven’t been able to have that benefit of my community.

And, I’m certainly missing my mother more than ever, feeling like she would have so much advice to give me and this would be a time when she would have so much to give. She’d be able to tell me so much about caring for a baby. I felt that as a refreshed grief. It’s another time in life when I miss her particularly. It’s an isolating time for everyone right now. I would really appreciate having the opportunity to just kind of connect with other moms, but in the digital sphere, it has meant a lot to me to make the connections that I have had. I’ve been emailing with other writer moms and just kind of connecting with them and seeing what they’re up to and commiserating, feeling their woes and just sort of sharing what we’re struggling with. That has been so meaningful to me. I know you and I have exchanged a few texts about some of the more difficult questions and dilemmas that we have had, and it’s been so great to connect with other writer moms and see what they went through at this stage or that stage and hear about what they’re struggling with. It definitely helps with the sense of being alone, to connect with other mothers and see what they’re living through.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, there is a universality to the experience of motherhood and of being a writer mother specifically, even though everyone’s experience is so different. I think the unpredictability and the loss of control, as you said earlier, are uniting factors among mothers. I mean, what a loss of control not just of your own body but of your space, your time, your sleep—of just about every aspect of your life. And then to rebuild your identity as the mother to this small being whose identity you’re still learning because they’re not born fully formed either. So, yeah, building a community is so important.

Blair Hurley  

It is, absolutely, just to get someone else’s experience about that. And that was something about my expectations beforehand that I’m starting to learn, which is that on some level, before I had my baby, I thought, “Oh, it’ll be hard until she reaches X milestone, and then I’ll get my life back and I’ll be myself again.” It’s not really that way at all. It’s taken some adjusting to realize that my identity has changed forever. I’m living a different life now than I was in the past. And that’s perfectly okay. Life is change, and change is not always bad. In this case, it’s been an incredibly positive change. There are so many ways that I feel more access to joyful experiences.”

That’s something that with my writing, I think it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens there. Because with writing, as well, I thought I could write the same way I was writing, or just carve out the time, thinking, “Of course it’s going to be hard, but I’ll find some time, and I’ll write the same things that I was writing before I had a baby.” But now I realize that no, again, my identity has changed. I’m going to be writing different things, I’m going to be concerned about different things, I’m going to be feeling different ways. And again, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it will probably enrich my writing in ways that I have yet to see. 

In my writing, I’m a little bit wary about being prone to sentimentality. It’s something that I’m really concerned about right now. Because, sure, there’s a lot of hormonal shifts that occur, particularly in those first few months, and yes, I was crying at commercials. I was feeling waves of emotion about things that before I could keep a very dry, ironic distance from. Or now, if there’s a movie where a child is in danger or a child is hurt, I can barely take it. It is amazing to me to see how my emotions have changed in that way. Things leveled out, and it got better, but I also feel that there’s some aspect of it, that there’s a permanent change, where I can feel a deeper sense of concern. Or it might be that I’m more prone to sentimentality. I’m not sure. I’ll have to watch out for that in my writing.

Lara Ehrlich  

Sentimentality is something I’ve heard other mother writers talk about. I think particularly as women, we’re conscious of sentimentality as being a negative in writing, right? Like, you don’t want to write prose that is purple or that is too emotional, because then it’s not literary. It becomes something different. And yes, as a mother, I feel the same way you do, where a story with a child in danger is hard to take. And that tendency when you’re writing on certain topics and subjects to veer into sentimentality—what’s wrong with sentimentality, do you think, as a writer?

Blair Hurley  

I’ve tried to make more of a distinction in my mind between what we generally call sentimentality and what might just be sentiment. It’s a useful distinction to make, because yes, there is a problem with excessive sentimentality in writing. If I had to define it, I suppose it would be a kind of heaping on of emotion that is instructing the reader to feel terrible or tragic in a manipulative way, whereas sentiment is just strong feeling. I want my readers to experience strong feelings, so I don’t want to be afraid of sentiment. 

In fact, I was reading a bunch of short stories in very prestigious literary magazines, and every now and then, I’ll feel a little bit impatient with the kinds of stories that I see that are so ironically detached, or bleakly showing sad people doing depraved things for no discernible reason. And I realized that no, these may be the stories that often get praise, but I’m not always sold by them. I actually do want to feel strongly about things, and I want to have an emotional experience. When I’m reading, I don’t want to just feel detachment or disdain or contempt for feeling. I do think restraint is powerful. You want the reader to feel emotion; you don’t want to have to grab them and shake them and say, “You have to feel this!” So, in a craft sense, restraint is important, but overall, I want my reader to feel something strongly, and I don’t want to be ashamed of that. 

I think women writers, and maybe mother writers in particular, can be denigrated or looked down upon if they’re willing to show emotion. I disagree, because realistic writing is about showing emotion, being willing to make a reader feel something. But there is a perception that if you do it from the perspective of motherhood, there’s something inherently sentimental about it.

Lara Ehrlich  

Sentimental and domestic.

Blair Hurley  

Yes, absolutely. 

Lara Ehrlich

“Domestic” being, as it should not be, sort of a curse word in the literary world. 

Blair Hurley

Kind of small-minded, afraid of risk taking, and that sort of thing. I hate that, because there are so many male writers who write about domestic spaces, and it’s seen as the height of intellectualism and experimentalism. I think about all the many Updike stories and novels about domestic situations, for example, and somehow because it’s from a male perspective or focusing on the male vantage point, it’s seen as more serious, more legitimate.

Lara Ehrlich  

And talk about purple prose and sentimentality—John Updike! I love the Rabbit books, I have to say, but yeah, why is it different for a male writer to write about a man leaving his family and escaping from domesticity? Why is that literary, and when a woman does the same, it’s either denigrated because she’s unlikable or it’s chick lit because she goes off and has an affair in Paris or something.

Blair Hurley  

So irritating that there’s a double standard of perception there. There was a question you were mentioning before we went live about the idea of transgression and how male characters and male authors are sort of encouraged and lauded for showing characters transgressing, and this is something that I felt very strongly as a writer before becoming a mother. In fact, my novel The Devoted is a lot about that: if a woman decides to take a transgressive route, she’s viewed differently than a man. So, in that case, it’s a character running away from home and going on her own kind of spiritual experience and adventure. I think the moral judgment that would be passed on her if she were a mother would be exponentially harsher, if she decided to do something transgressive like that—to leave a child, even temporarily, just to get away. To somehow not be thinking about her child at all times and all moments in her entire sphere—moral judgment would be passed on a character like that.

Lara Ehrlich  

To be a bad mom and an unlikable woman, right?

Blair Hurley  

Yeah, absolutely. That idea is something that I think I’ll probably always be fascinated with as a writer, and I’ll probably write about it. I’m only just beginning to learn how much higher the stakes are for a character as a mother who’s interested in transgressing in some way and breaking out of norms. The stakes are so high for a female character who has a child.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, in the same way that I feel like, for example, in a thriller, the stakes become much higher if it’s a child who is held captive or kidnapped. There’s something about the vulnerability, or the perceived vulnerability, of that character and the transgression of that vulnerability.

Blair Hurley  

Yeah, absolutely. There’s this feeling that is wrapped up in a lot of sexist ideas about the purity of girls and how it’s important to preserve the purity of girls and how their innocence is something that needs to be preserved. I find all of that deeply problematic and often angering. We both have daughters, and maybe this is something you’ve started thinking about. Once I found out I was having a girl, all these thoughts swirled through my mind about how I could be a good parent to a girl in particular, because there are so many ways she’s going to learn to devalue herself or see herself as vulnerable to corruption or to the repugnant ideas out there around girls and women. 

One funny thing that I remember about my parents’ views about parenting—this is maybe one of the more unusual things that they felt strongly about—was that they didn’t want their kids—I have a sister—to grow up thinking that the world was a malevolent and scary place. There were all these classes, like “stranger danger” lessons that kids would be taught in the ‘80s. My parents refused to sign the permission slip and took us out of school for the day for the “stranger danger” one. They felt that strongly about it. That was their hill to die on. They didn’t want their kids to get the impression that the world is a scary place, that you should be afraid of everything and everyone that you should feel anxiety. Of course, we all have read various statistics about how we’re probably living in one of the safest times that humans have ever lived, and crime has been on the decline for a long time. That’s a wonderful thing, and yet, there’s this perception of the world as an increasingly dangerous and malevolent place.

Lara Ehrlich 

In ways that are not as visible, right? Online.

Blair Hurley    

Absolutely. It’s a really funny balance to have to strike as a parent today. These dangers are real, and there are ways in which we have to teach our children to be safe, to protect themselves, to know about the dangers that exist. And yet my parents decided that was one thing that they didn’t want us to feel overall. I mean, they taught us things about being safe, but they didn’t want us to have the impression that the world was a malevolent place. I think that was interesting. That’s something that I can point out as a definitive parenting decision my parents made. I question what balance I want to strike with my child; what kind of perception do I want her to have about the world? There are ways in which, as a girl, she’s uniquely vulnerable to some dangers that she wouldn’t have to think about if she were a boy. And yet at the same time, I don’t want her to feel fearful of the world.So, it’s a difficult balance to strike.

Lara Ehrlich  

We have that same conversation all the time, specifically around sex and education and bodies. You want to make sure that your daughter’s not ashamed of her body but at the same time, trying to avoid the messaging around purity and virginity and the sacredness of her “flower.” How do you instill respect and empowerment without those ickier sides of sex education? It’s gonna be tricky. I think you hit it pretty straight on with the ‘80s, the messaging. There’s just something so creepy about the messaging from the ‘‘80s around sex and drugs and “stranger danger” and all of these after-school specials.

Blair Hurley  

Maybe it was one of the first generations where people were talking frankly about dangers, when before they were unspoken. In some ways, that may have been a positive improvement, to talk about some of these things explicitly. But there are also ways in which they, I think, got it wrong. One thing that made a big impression on me was when I learned about the way that they’ve changed the character of Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street. In the old days, in a previous generation, Snuffleupagus was invisible to adults. Only children could see him on the show. And then they decided to change this after consulting with a lot of child psychologists and experts, because the danger of that narrative, the experts believed, was that it was a case of where the children are always trying to tell the adults that they can see something happening, and the adults don’t believe them. So it’s a kind of ominous sign. So if a child is, for example, being abused or something, they’re learning the lesson with this particular story, unintentionally, that if they tell adults, they won’t be believed. So it seems like such a harmless thing, but I can see how that might have the unintended consequence of teaching children that their stories don’t matter and that they won’t be believed if they tell an adult something. What I’ve taken from that is the importance of really respecting the inner life of a child and believing a child, being willing to value their story, and listening if they tell you something.

Lara Ehrlich  

There’s a lot to unpack here with storytelling, the power of characters in childhood, and the way that adults can write for and to children. Just to go back to your own daughter and your writing. Obviously, she’s too young to read your book right now, but thinking about your daughter, when she’s maybe 15, 16, and older, maybe when she’s a mother herself, what would you want her to read into your work, whether it’s The Devoted or work that you’ll write from here on out?

Blair Hurley  

My first thought is that it’s something I really hope for my daughter: to be a reader, to love reading, and to have books as a great source of joy or comfort or stimulation or challenge in her life, no matter what path she chooses. I think that being a reader is such a valuable part of having a meaningful life. My side note is we read lots of books with her every day, little board books, and she started turning the pages herself today, so she figured out the system. When I’m done reading a page, she’ll turn the page. I’m just very proud of that right now. 

But when she’s 15 or 16, what I think is that, first of all, it’s perfectly healthy and normal for a child to be totally uninterested in the private lives of their parents and to be a little bit mortified by it and to just be totally detached from it. I’m perfectly okay with that. I won’t be insulted or hurt. I think it’s perfectly fine for kids to lead their own lives. If she does have an interest, I will be perfectly happy. If she finds something meaningful there, if she does have a curiosity about my life before I had her and the kind of person I was then, the writing that I was doing, I hope on some level that she’s proud of the work I do, and I want her—hypothetically, in the future—to see me working and to be proud of that and see it as a major part of my life, something that’s part of my identity. I would be perfectly fine if she is embarrassed by the deep feelings that are in there. Above all, I think that one of my jobs as a parent is to encourage and foster a child to learn how to lead her own life and define her life the way she sees fit.

Lara Ehrlich  

Did you wonder about your own mother’s private life? What did what did you see her doing? Did she read a lot? Was she a writer? 

Blair Hurley  42:22  

She was a writer, which is something that I feel very proud of. That is something that was a great, strong connection that we shared. She wrote a number of short stories that were published in small magazines. She never published a full-length book. She was a lifelong, avid reader, as well. My love of reading definitely came from her. We would share books and read to each other and talk about books. And I would rush to her with my little written-up stories, you know, and have her edit them. She was strict, as well. She had high standards. Even if I was 9 or 10, she would mark it all up and say, like, ‘Too many commas here,’ or, ‘This metaphor is not working.’ She would give me real feedback. And I would run to the computer and try to implement the changes and then rush back with another version. So yeah, we shared this love of reading and writing that is one of my fondest memories of our bond. 

She had really interesting interests, I would say. In her own career, she was a wine importer. She created her own business from scratch. I was always proud of her. I had this sense of her starting this business and figuring out how to make it work. It also enabled her to work from home, so that meant that she was always there. We had a variety of babysitters and stuff, but I never had to be away from her for long periods. Even as a kid, I realized that that was kind of a rare opportunity. So that’s something that I hope to have.

Lara Ehrlich  

I want to get into that deeper because I wanted to ask you about the work you do outside of your creative writing. But first, I just want to remind viewers, you can post questions and comments. We’ll see them come in. And we do have a question here from Brittany for you, Blair. This goes back to our conversation about sentiment and sentimentality. Could you tell us which female authors you feel do an elegant job of navigating that balance of sentiment and story? Great question.

Blair Hurley  

I love a woman writer who’s willing to engage with a little bit of cruelty, like a thin edge between warm tenderness and cruelty or viciousness. I think Alice Munro does a great job of this. On the surface, she’s portrayed as a quiet, domestic writer—again, that perception of women writers as being quiet, little writers or something—but she’s a writer with a lot of ferocity, I think. There are these incredibly devastating moments in a great climax of her story, where we’ll suddenly realize that a scene that we thought meant one thing is turning on its head and, in fact, something else is happening here. It’s sort of a knife’s edge element of perception between who’s being cruel and who’s being kind, or who’s acting in order to protect someone else. I love Alice Munro so much. 

And this is not a female author, but I’ll put him in there anyway. I grew up loving John Steinbeck. I think he often gets a bad rap or he’s seen as a somewhat sentimental writer—he’s willing to engage with big sweeps of emotion in his writing and show suffering on the page and show how painful situations are, and he’s sometimes looked down upon for that very reason. But I think he does it very powerfully and well. I am willing to engage with that powerful sweep of emotion, the feeling that sometimes life does exist on an epic scope. So yeah, I’m a Steinbeck fan. 

I’m just looking over my bookshelf because there’s a writer that I really enjoyed who I only discovered a couple years ago, Ruth Ozeki. Her book A Tale for the Time Being was one of my favorites of the past five years. It got a lot of attention when it came out. It’s about a diary that washes up on the shores of California all the way from Japan after the tsunami. And so this woman who lives alone is reading the diary of a young Japanese girl, and bit by bit, we learn about the girl’s life, and we’re also learning about the California woman’s life, alternating chapters, and we see how they’re kind of reaching this amazing connection across time and across an ocean. I think it’s truly a beautiful book. The teenage girl is in a really terrible situation. She’s being bullied at school and is quite miserable. And the author’s willingness to engage with teenage-girl misery maybe is seen as sentimental, but I was moved by it. I was totally moved by this girl who felt totally trapped in her situation and didn’t—couldn’t—see a way out.

Lara Ehrlich  

That leads into another great question from Brittany. Brittany, I think I’m gonna invite you on here to ask some questions. she asks how having a daughter has changed how you plan to write female characters.

Blair Hurley  

Oh, good question. As I said, I feel still so, so young in the stages that I’m sure I’m going to learn more as time progresses. I almost feel like I’m only just starting to learn her personality and starting to see it come out in the most recent months, which is a true delight, to see her starting to become an individual. The way motherhood is already changing my writing about girlhood particularly is seeing how fiercely girls want to become—to grow and to become yourself. Even at my daughter’s young age, I can see it in her desires and in the way she’s trying to figure things out and how she gets excited when she’s able to do some new skill. I see it as this powerful desire to become, which I find deeply moving to witness, and I feel honored to witness.

When I’m writing characters, I want to try to capture that desire and that process of becoming. No character is truly static, if I’m doing a good job. They’re always wanting things and wanting to become something else and wanting to grow and to be a better version of themselves, or to escape, or to transform. Everyone wants to become—and when girls are wanting to become, it’s seen as a dangerous thing. There’s something dangerous about a girl who wants something for herself, who wants to transform. I hope to write characters that have that ferocity of desire, and also, to engage with the danger and the risk of that.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s fabulous. What a great answer. And I want to read those stories immediately. Something I love Blair about this conversation is that you’ve touched so often on the joy of motherhood and of thinking about writing from a mother’s perspective. I think we often lean into how hard it is to write as a writer-mom, but it’s also such a joyful and powerful honor to learn from this little person, and then imbue our writing with the lessons that we’re taking from this shift in identity. Thank you for talking about the joyful parts. That’s so valuable and so empowering. 

Blair Hurley  

I do want to give that impression, because it is it is an amazingly joyful experience. And as you said, it’s an honor, for anyone who decides to make this choice. It’s an incredible experience. I will say as well, though, another thing I didn’t expect when people talk about how hard it is to make time for your writing, which I do feel powerfully, is that I thought I would feel resentment, like I was a prisoner unable to work and I would feel horrible about it. But actually, it’s more insidious than that, because I’m too busy feeling happy and joyful to be with my baby. That’s why the work is not getting done. It’s not because my child is a tyrant or a jailkeeper; it’s that I want to be with her. I’m the jailer. I’m the one keeping myself from writing. I did not expect that at all. But the happy aspects of parenting are actually the ones preventing me from being productive right now.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s fascinating. And so well said. And it’s something Amy Shearn and I talked about in the last episode, that before I became a mother, my husband was adamant that we’d make time for my writing—and I was lucky to have that support—but then, like you, when my daughter was born, I was like, “Well, I just want to play with her,” or stare at her. Writing does take focus, and whether you’re writing for five minutes or five hours, that means your focus is not on your child. And that’s very difficult when time with your daughter is so enticing. 

Blair Hurley  

That deep, unfettered focus is essential for writing well, and for diving into those creative ideas, and it’s a constant struggle. I feel very grateful to be in a partnership as well. I’m in awe of parents who are doing this solo, because I can I can even fully understand how one would do it. I have an equal partnership with my husband, and that means when he’s taking care of her—and it’s not like he’s helping either; I hate when people say dads are helping; no, they’re raising their children—then I can feel fully at ease that she’s with her father, and it’s going to be okay. That’s an essential part of the equation. But it’s true that it’s so enticing to think about—whether it’s worrying or thinking happily about—your child. It’s just such a such a draw. 

My husband and I have devised a system because we both need time for deep, deep work where we don’t have to think for a few a couple hours about the baby. We have a system where we each have one day a week where we’re the primary parent, and we take on as much on as we can to give the other partner the chance to work in an unbothered way. It seems like a great idea, and it has helped a lot, but the first day that was mine, honestly, I just spent the time looking at videos of the baby. I just couldn’t get back into it. I was still in parent mode. I was missing her, even though she and my husband were just outside my office. 

I can see how ridiculous that is. But it takes a concerted effort to find that place, that quiet place that I think is essential for good writing. If you’re only trying to write in little bits while feeding the baby, I don’t think you’ll be able to arrive at bolder and deeper and darker ideas. I think it’s important to have unfettered time periods, however you manage it, and to do your best to honor that time and only focus on writing.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, you know, I’ll say two things. I agree with you that to get really deep into a story, you need unfettered time. But you can use those little chunks of time where your attention is divided, too. I’ve filled those moments with other tasks that are writing related. When I was commuting to work, I would dictate to myself and use an app to transcribe the dictation. When I got home and my husband was feeding my daughter, I could sit with them at the table and clean up the transcription. And that only took like half of my brain so I could still sit with my family. And then when I had the time to really sit and go deeper, that was the time when I would look at what I had on the page and really devote myself to going deeper with it and making it writing as opposed to just a stream of consciousness. 

Blair Hurley  

I think that that’s so smart and important because it’s true. There are all sorts of phases of writing work that need to be done that don’t require that deepest of focus. I still write a lot of my drafts by hand first, but then there’s the phase of just typing it up, so that I can do with a very divided mind, I can get that done. It’s when writing those first drafts that I feel I need to get into that quiet place. And sometimes when I’m doing a major revision as well, I need to call my most creative powers into play. 

Lara Ehrlich  

We’re coming to an end. But first, I’ll say that it’s really important that you said when we do have those moments during which we can devote ourselves to a story, it’s important to honor those times. That’s really hard. Before the interview, we were talking about mom guilt, and that feeling of guilt that you’re stealing time from your child, or that you are missing out on something, or that you’re being selfish. And it’s often hard for women, too, to ask for something for yourself, or to demand something for yourself. It can feel selfish. But really, it’s necessary. Writing is our vocation.

Blair Hurley  

It’s powerful and tempting to feel that it’s plus or minus, that any time you take something for yourself, you’re taking it away from your child. That can be heartbreaking. I think a lot of women feel that, and it’s so unfortunate, because it’s an illusion. This isn’t a political discussion, but there are so many ways in which I wish our society was set up to support parents better. And on a personal, emotional level, I think it’s so important for women to feel okay about valuing their work and valuing themselves. And ultimately, it’s important for their children to see that as well. It’s better for the child to see a mother valuing herself and valuing her work. 

When I think back to my own childhood, I was a very kind of introspective, introverted child who just liked being off with my book or imagining stories with my toys. And I think it was so valuable and precious that my mother and my father just let me have that time to be off in my head and to explore and to be alone to figure out things on my own. And it’s those private moments when I grew as a child, and as a person, I think. 

I’m trying to remember as best as I can right now that it’s actually good for my child to allow her those private spaces to grow and to figure out things. Even just in these few months, I can see how it’s usually is the moment that I take a little bit of a step back that she’s able to learn a new skill. A silly example: I kept trying to guide her hands and guide her hands to help her hold her sippy cup, and finally, I was like, “You figure it out.” And then she did. We need these breathing spaces; we need to have private and quiet spaces for our own growth. I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s good for our children to have these spaces of their own while their parents do the things they need to do.

Lara Ehrlich  

Blair, thank you so much, again, for joining us. I can’t wait to see what you do next and I hope you’ll come back because this has just been such a great conversation.

Blair Hurley  

I had such a great time chatting with you, Lara and it’s been great just to articulate some of my ideas about motherhood and parenthood.

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & RESOURCES

Blair Hurley’s website

www.blairhurley.com

Blair’s book

The Devoted (WW Norton, 2018)

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357301

Rabbit, Run, John Updike (Random House, 1960)

Snuffleupagus’s identity shift on Sesame Street 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-sesame-streets-snuffleupagus-iidentity-crisis-180957351/

John Steinbeck

https://www.biography.com/writer/john-steinbeck

Alice Munro

https://www.biography.com/writer/alice-munro

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (Penguin Books, 2013)

http://www.ruthozeki.com/writing-film/a-tale-for-the-time-being