Writer Mother Monster: Melanie Conroy-Goldman, “Motherhood turns you into a milk cow.”

“Motherhood turns you into a milk cow.”
Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of The Likely World and a Professor of Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She volunteers at a maximum security men’s prison and lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter and step-daughters. Melanie describes writer-motherhood in three words as: “richly entangled identities.” In this episode, she talks about balancing addiction and motherhood, the urgent need for childcare, and crossing boundaries in writing from life. Find out why she threw Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle across the room.

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

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster

Melanie Conroy-Goldman

January 7, 2021

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of the novel The Likely World (Red Hen Press). A professor of creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She also volunteers at a maximum-security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter, and stepdaughters. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “richly entangled identities.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Melanie Conroy-Goldman. Before I introduce Melanie, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcripts at your leisure all on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible. 

Please also chat with us during the live interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. 

Now I’m excited to introduce Melanie. Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of the novel The Likely World (Red Hen Press). A professor of creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She also volunteers at a maximum-security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter, and stepdaughters. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “richly entangled identities.” Welcome, Melanie.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Thanks for having me on.

Lara Ehrlich   

Absolutely. Now first of all, tell us a little bit about the Trias Residency for Writers?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

It’s at the college where I teach, Hobart and William Smith College. It’s a year-long residency for a later-career writer, and it provides housing and generous benefits and a generous salary. The writer comes to campus, teaches one class in the first semester, and then is in low residency in the second semester, so they work with a small group of students in a tutorial. It’s designed by writers to give time to a writer, and the end of the residence itself is really lovely. We’ve had Mary Gaitskill, Jeff VanderMeer, Lidia Yuknavitch, Tom Piazza… poets come, too, but I manage the fiction writing half, so that’s who pops to mind.

Lara Ehrlich  

You mentioned that the residency helps writers have the time and space to work on their craft. Talk about how you make time and space for your writing. But first, tell us a little bit about your family. Who lives in your house?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman   

Well, I live with my husband and my biological daughter, whose name is Coco. And then I have two stepdaughters who are 17 and about to launch into applying for college right now. And that’s that. Then I have an older stepdaughter, who is at college right now. 

Lara Ehrlich  

So, you have a full range of daughters.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I do. I have all the daughters.

Lara Ehrlich  

Give us a brief summary of your writing life and career. We are both Red Hen Press authors. Tell us just a little bit about The Likely World, and then about where you came into writing and how you found your way into academia.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

So, this book started in the car. I was driving. I commute an hour to work. And the first couple of lines—in fact, most of the first chapter—just started playing in my head. I know when that happens, nothing else matters—the other drivers on the road, the fact that you’re on a slick, two-lane highway, through the woods where deer leap out. None of that matters. I rooted around on the floor for a piece of paper, and it turned out to be one of my daughter’s drawings, and sacrilegiously, I wrote a couple of words while I was driving. That’s where the novel began. 

My daughter was 5 at the time. I had just met my husband. I’d been a single mom up until that point. So that sense of the pressure and difficulty of parenting solo was very much present in The Likely World. I had a draft of it probably a year and a half later. It’s a long book. It’s like, 350 pages. I’m a serious reviser. I probably did roughly 12 full revisions of the book. My agent, Bill Clegg, brought it to Red Hen. I think he’d met [publisher] Kate Gale on a plane or something by coincidence, and they started talking about the book, and she wanted it, and that’s where I ended up. And that’s how I know you. So that’s the story of how this book was made. Roughly. Overview.

I entered academia through luck. It was never my plan, and I know it’s so hard right now, to get in. I always say when I’m reading stacks of applications, where the people are so talented and there are so many wonderful candidates, that I don’t know how I could compete with the people coming up now. But my mentor in graduate school, Peter Ho Davies, pointed me towards an emerging writer fellowship at Gettysburg College, in its very first year, and I applied and got that fellowship. Then from there, I continued to just be lucky. I got a visiting gig at Rhodes College, which converted to a tenure line. Then I applied to Hobart and William Smith and ended up there, where I’ve been for, I think, 19 years.

Lara Ehrlich  

Let’s go back for a second to the beginning of The Likely World. Funny, the novel I’m working on right now came to me in the car with a couple sentences. I have an hour commute as well and use that time to think and generate ideas. Do you remember, or would you consider sharing, those first few words that generated your novel?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Should I read them?

Lara Ehrlich  

Sure, that’d be great.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Okay.

The black SUV pulls into my driveway, on the evening of my 29th day sober. Junie is downstairs bouncing in the safari seat in front of her cartoons. Twilight has fallen. But I’ve been trying and failing to work all day. And I have yet to pause to turn on the lamp.

I think, as you can hear, the pressure of parenting and working is right there at the center of the novel. And it plays itself out throughout the main character, who is a recovering addict and newly recovered, and she’s trying to work, but she’s also trying to stay sober. 

One of the things that I write about is that entering sobriety is an incredibly demanding life phase, and trying to parent while trying to also do the work of staying sober is an extra barrier that I think hasn’t often been written about, although some people have written about it incredibly beautifully. That act of balancing is both present in work for working mothers and for mothers who are struggling with various kinds of mental health issues, including addiction.

Lara Ehrlich  

We’ll get to working motherhood in a second. But let’s talk a bit more about the addiction side and what is particularly challenging about the addiction that then makes motherhood challenging and vice versa? How do they play off of each other in real life but also, how did you translate that experience for the book?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Addiction is every addict’s first love. There’s no way around it. Getting high or staving off cravings is just so powerful within the brain chemistry, that the thing that should come first, which is a child, can’t. There’s a sort of central betrayal at the heart of any addict parent, and if you ever hear any person who’s recovered from addiction talk about parenting, they’ll always say that they couldn’t parent in the way that it has to be. It has to be primary. There’s no other way to parent, because the addiction is primary. 

And recovery, although it’s necessary for any addict to be able to parent, in some ways has to come first to work. So even though the move is good for the child, there’s this intermediary phase where recovery is going to take the front seat. In terms of translating it into the novel, there are passages where the child isn’t present, long sections where what I hope is that the reader will kind of be troubled. Where’s the baby? Why aren’t you seeing what’s going on with the baby? Although it seems that the character has forgotten, as a writer, I haven’t forgotten. And that anxiety that the reader might feel for where the child is during this time is paid off when we return to the child, and we find out where that child has been. The novel keeps track of the child, even if the character can’t. And that’s a way of kind of demonstrating that tension.

Lara Ehrlich  

You write that so beautifully. I think it’s incredibly challenging to write anxiety. Not just to write about anxiety, but to infuse a book and the prose with a sense of anxiety, to give the reader that sense of anxiety. I think that was particularly thrilling and heart wrenching in The Likely World. We have a question here from Amy Shearn, another Red Hen Press author. She says she loves The Likely World so much. She says, “Is it the first novel you ever wrote? Or are there some other book drafts in drawers somewhere?”

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Oh, there are book drafts in drawers. I have two. One that I finished writing about a month before my daughter was born, with the intention of picking it back up. But I could not, partly because I was the single mom of a baby who had some health trouble. And I also could not because I was a new person afterwards. The things that concerned me were not the same as the things that concerned that person before. But the narrative is also about a child in peril. It’s also about that tension between parents’ lives and the needs of a child. But it was set in the 1970s in a radicalized women’s movement. And then, while she was a baby, I wrote a second one that’s about a pregnant woman on the run from an abusive spouse. That was kind of like the escapist book that I was trying to write. You can tell I’m not very good at escapism, but it was. It was a set in a kind of post-apocalyptic world, and the narrator is pregnant and leaving her spouse and moving into this unknown territory. It doesn’t take a deep psychologist to read that one. And then I kind of got to the end of that one and felt like, Okay, this was the book I wrote to keep writing. But this wasn’t the book I wanted to bring out. 

Lara Ehrlich  

I think we all have those drafts that are in drawers. 

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Yeah, probably. 

Lara Ehrlich 

But let’s go back to what you said. There is something really interesting that I’ve heard from some of the other mother writers on the show, that after becoming a mother, your interests, your themes changed, your way of writing, your connection with characters—all of those things do change, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in pretty extreme ways. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like for you? What do you mean by that, those books no longer interested you?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

The clearest way I can say it is that before I wrote The Likely World, I was writing about characters. And when I wrote The Likely World, I was writing as a character. I found a way to inhabit the character that felt more authentic to me. I didn’t want to talk about things anymore. I wanted to be vivid and live inside of an electric experience. And it just felt like a new way of writing. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens next, because I’m trying to write characters who are less like myself and trying to embody that same kind of thing. It’s a cool process.

Lara Ehrlich  

What do you think it is about motherhood that made you inhabit characters rather than write about them?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I think partly it’s the intensity of the experience. As the parent of a young child, a baby, you live so much in the moment. You’re embedded in experience. Maybe other people live that way all the time, I don’t know. But for me, I’m a pretty intellectual person. On the spectrum, my brain was carried around inside of my body. But motherhood turns you into, like, a milk cow. Even if you’re not breastfeeding, you’re the provider of milk. There’s no two ways about it. Your body is first. So that kind of transforms experience. 

I also think that there is a desperation to be yourself that emerges from that period of being melded with another human. There’s an intense connection to self that comes. I don’t know if you’re there yet, Lara. When I still had a 3 1/2-year-old, I still felt like there was very little brain space. But when she turned 5 and suddenly could entertain herself, there was space.

Lara Ehrlich  

I can’t wait for that to happen. I’m still very much in the phase of like, if I try to do something on my own or by myself, the little person comes in and says, “What are you doing? Will you play with me? I need a juice. I want a snack.” You know, all those things.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I want to touch your body.

Lara Ehrlich  21:52  

Oh, there’s so much touching.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Yeah, there’s not as much touching when you have teenagers. In fact, you have to chase after them. And grab kind of a half hug.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s what I keep reminding myself, as she’s sleeping in our bed now for the probably fifth or sixth week in a row. Someday, she won’t want to snuggle with me, so I should enjoy it—enjoy the sleepless nights—while I can. 

So, tell me, how did you actually manage to write a book with an infant? Whether or not you publish that book, you still were writing, you are generating. Did you complete the book? What were your strategies for writing when she was that young?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

First of all, I just want to say, I am no role model. I mean, I found it incredibly hard. I saw your guest last week, and she just sounded like a genius, who was breastfeeding and doing PR at the same time and writing books in a pandemic with the baby. And I was like, that’s just not me. I did a lot of not writing, and I don’t think I could have done it any other way. It wasn’t a lack of will or whatever, I was just nursing a baby. Most of my waking hours were trying to get that baby to sleep or bouncing her because she was crying. As a single mom, especially, but I think dual-parent families have the same thing, it just wasn’t gonna happen. 

And then I got this magical thing called childcare. And that’s how I did it. I was on leave from work. I had a maternity leave stacked on top of a tenure leave. I had childcare 25 hours a week, and that’s how I did it. I was so fortunate to have those things. I think everyone should have those things. I mean, every parent should have adequate childcare. I think there are probably lots of people who have kids under five who are barely writing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Anything else is extraordinary and superhuman. Anyone who’s squeezing out a couple of words a week with a child under five is doing great.

Lara Ehrlich  

Very well said. I want to go back to childcare, because I know it was something that you said you were particularly interested in talking about when we chatted before the interview. And I think you hit the nail on the head: it’s something that is so inadequate in our country and so beyond so many people’s grasp. It should not be a luxury to have childcare in any world, but particularly a well-developed world. Can we talk a little bit about that? What would your ideal childcare revolution look like?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I mean, I think one of the things that has to happen is cultural, right? There’s still shame around not taking care of your kids full-time, not being a stay-at-home mom, and that’s bananas. I think childcare providers need to be paid well. The money that childcare providers make is criminal. And it needs to be everywhere. It needs to be a given. 

I’ve been thinking about childcare as a lens for thinking critically about fiction, and I was rereading My Struggle today, the Karl Ove Knausgård book, which I had cast away because it enraged me in terms of how it deals with childcare. He’s in Sweden, in the first volume, and he has a partner, and he has free childcare readily available. And he’s moaning about how hard it is to be a writer and a parent. And I think, that’s totally legit. It is hard to be a writer and a parent, even if you have free Swedish childcare. But it wouldn’t be a novel, if it were written by a woman, right? Like, the only reason why “his struggle” to be a writer, while also having to sometimes occasionally provide childcare to his own children, is the topic of a novel is because he’s a man. 

I know there are many women who are novelists, and many novels that don’t contend with children, but for women novelists, the assumption is that it’s hard to do both. It’s not the subject. It’s not the plot. The fact that it’s somehow elevated to this kind of spectacular thing that he must be both, and that he’s an international genius, made me angry. And I have much more to say on that subject, but let’s get to the questions.

Lara Ehrlich  

No, I love that. Very well said. And I guess we should read things that enrage us, because they’re educational, but I don’t think I could read that right now. I think I would burn that book. I do want to come back to childcare, if others have questions about it, because I think this is such a vital conversation, and it’s something that so badly needs to change in the structure of our country—and the way that women are supported in our creative pursuits, there’s just a lot there to talk about. So, if anyone has further questions, please put them in the chat. Alexis David says, “I’m so intrigued with the idea of the drug cloud in The Likely World. What interested you about the concept of forgetting?”

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

You know, it didn’t start out being about forgetting, but it became that pretty quickly. Originally, it was much more about regret. I suppose what I started out with was a state we all enter, after you’ve done something hideously embarrassing. I know this is gonna sound really trivial, but I’m being honest about where it came from. I know that probably most people have seminal embarrassing experiences that they rehearse over and over again, and Jennifer Egan, in A Visit from the Goon Squad, writes about it beautifully. She calls them shame memories. I thought, what if you could just eliminate that feeling? Just exorcise that thing from your brain? And I think we all think about the brain this way, right? It’s just in our heads, right? I feel sad, but it’s just in my head. There’s nothing really happening that’s making me sad. Or I feel embarrassed, but it’s just in my head. And we live in a pharmacopoeia, where there are drugs for so many things, and we tend to medicate so many things. It felt like a way of thinking about the reality of experience, and also the subjectivity of experience, that paradox. Our own experience is very, very powerful, and it drives our behavior. In this case, shame and shame memories. But it’s also absolutely a theory. I was able to imagine a drug that would eliminate that experience and then think about the “what if?” What would that mean for us if we could really exorcise parts of our experience? So that’s kind of where I started and sort of gathered narratives.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s a great question. Keep them coming, everybody. Let’s talk about shame a little bit more. You mentioned shame in relation to motherhood earlier as well, when we were talking about childcare and how there’s still that sense of shame so many mothers feel when they’re not full-time caregivers, and I’m not a full-time caregiver—or at least, I wasn’t before the pandemic. Now that’s changed for a lot of people. So, let’s talk about that sense of shame. Why do you think women feel that sense of shame when we turn to childcare?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

You know, I’m a feminist. I’m a second-wave feminist, so I’m not even a cool feminist. I was raised by a feminist mom in the 1970s, and that kind of “second wave, Gloria Steinem” situation was very influential on me, and I never really expected that I would grow up and feel that the idealized, heteronormative, patriarchal idea of wife or motherhood would be important to me. I thought, like, I’m charting my own path. I’m gonna do my thing. Equality is good, but I was completely wrong. 

I feel affirmed when my house is clean and I cook a good meal. I feel affirmed in this space, where, it turns out, I’m surprisingly insecure. I feel affirmed when I perform motherhood in a way that’s kind of acceptable to the public. You know, when I bake the brownies for the bake sale on time—and I’m horrible at most of those things. I’m a good cook, but other than that, I’m a spacey mom. I am. I am the world’s worst housekeeper. 

But instead of just saying, “That’s who I am, we got a messy house, we’re gonna deal with it,” I just carry shame and shame clean every now and then. And shame brownie bake, and all that kind of stuff. 

It’s fascinating to me that I was not raised with these ideas. I do not subscribe to them. But I’m not immune. You know, it’s like, body image stuff. It’s impossible to be a woman in America and to not worry about the shape of your body, no matter what you believe intellectually. It is a life’s work to re-do yourself or to minimize that pressure, and it’s insane. So… I don’t even remember where we started.

Lara Ehrlich  

Actually, that harkens back to something. You mentioned my last guest, Katie Gutierrez, something that she had said about the messaging that she internalized. The messages didn’t come from her family or from any clear source; it was just the sense of what was expected of her as a mother, as a writer. And these internalized expectations surprised her when she had to face them as a mother writer. So, I hear you on that, too. No one ever told me I needed to be a perfect mother or do X, Y, or Z. But I feel a lot of pressure and a lot of guilt and shame around those expectations, too. I am not sure where I absorb them from. So yeah, you’re not alone in that.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I appreciate the way, in Animal Wife, you sort of set up counter narratives to that kind of dominant, patriarchal narrative. For you guys who haven’t read it, it’s awesome. And you should read it. It’s amazing. But, for example, the title story is about a mother who leaves. It takes an expected narrative and gender swaps it and explores the consequences in ways that I think are really powerful. And I see that throughout.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you. And I think that’s related to the mother in your book who is grappling with addiction. I think that’s something that we see more often from the male point of view, whether it’s a father or just a man, typically an artist, who’s grappling with an addiction. But there’s something that feels very transgressive about writing a woman who leaves her family or who is addicted to drugs or alcohol—these things that are unlikable for a woman to do but seem somewhat romantic when done by a man. We’ve talked about Rabbit, Run with other guests—that sort of gorgeous fantasy of this man who is no longer happy with his marriage and his small child and just ups and leaves and has this adventure. And yes, it’s at times heartbreaking, but I have seen very few narratives about women who do the same, and I can think of probably a lot of narratives about unsatisfied men. I think that’s a brave thing to do. And I see you doing that in The Likely World as well.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Yeah. Okay. Let me pitch you my childcare as literary criticism idea: In young adult fantasy literature, it’s a truism that you have to get rid of the parents in order for the characters who are young to go on adventures. And the reason you have to get rid of that is so that they can be responsible for themselves and face true danger. 

Similarly, for many narratives, you have to take care of the kids in some way, if there are children in the narrative in order for the adults to go on adventures. So, my lens now is: Does the narrative provide childcare? Does it think about what’s happening to the kids as the adventure takes place? 

The Odyssey is crap at that. Eventually, we find out what’s going on, but it’s like, he just leaves, and he’s not really worried about what’s going on with Telemachus. But on the other hand, in the Christian Bible, there’s Mary and Joseph, and they’ve got to bring the kid along with them when they go to the tax assessor. It’s a problem and the narrative has to contend with it. 

I think it opens up a lot of possibilities. It might not be like the new Marxist theory, but it’s helped me understand why some books really pissed me off and why some books are really wonderful. And you know, in Animal Wife—not to keep obsessing about your book—one of the things that the childcare lens kind of allowed me to think about was what happens in the absence of adequate childcare. And that is part of the plot. That’s part of the driver for so many of your stories. 

The absence of adult supervision, I think acknowledges the importance of good caregiving in ways that the traditional male adventure narrative doesn’t bother with it. Someone else is taking care of that—a servant or wife or someone else. It’s not part of the story.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and I wonder if readers even question it. Do they notice the absence or question the children if it’s a male adventure versus a female adventure? If we read a book about a woman who leaves her family, we’re always wondering what’s happening with her children and who’s taking care of them. But men, like you said, Odysseus—he can go off. I wonder if anyone really approaches male narratives with that lens, because we’re conditioned not to. We just expect that there’s a woman or caregiver taking care of that child that he’s left behind. I think that’s a fascinating lens to look at fiction through.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of books where it’s really central to the narrative that the man is sick of taking care of the kids, and then he takes off—and I’m worried that this is going to be like the First World male novel, and I’m not here for that. Like, I’m not here to feel sorry for the fact that you have to do 44% of the childcare.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, we can talk about the emotional labor and all of that. Have you seen that wonderful comic by French cartoonist Emma about the mental load? I’ll have to send that to you. I’ll put it on the page with your interview, so everyone can look at it there. It’s really helped frame some conversations with my husband, who is actually really good at the emotional labor—I want to give him credit. But I’ve seen with lots of my friends whose significant other is not as present, that they could bring it to the table and say, “Read this, and let’s have a conversation about it.” 

We have a comment from a viewer here: “Relying on childcare may be the one thing that moms feel shame about. There are also the many mistakes we make as parents—some fleeting and some with lasting effects that cause shame.” I think you’re so right. I think that leads into this question from another viewer: “Do your kids read your writing? Or do you want them to? Do you ever think about what they will think of your writing as you’re writing? Or do you ever feel weird about how little you ponder your kids’ possible response to your writing?” 

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I think one of the crazy things is that we feel shame for things that weren’t our fault. We feel shame for every way in which our children’s lives aren’t perfect. One of the things that drove the writing of The Likely World was my daughter’s sickness. She had very severe food allergies, and it took us a really long time to identify them. She lost four pounds between when she was 12 and 16 months old, and it was terrifying. And of course, I felt guilty. I felt like I had done something to cause it. That’s part of how I wrote the narrator of The Likely World, sort of imagining, what if it was something bad that I did that made her sick? So, I think we do feel a lot of shame, and we all make mistakes. Of course, we all make lots of mistakes. But we carry more shame than we deserve. So, I hear you.

So officially, none of my children have read the book. Certainly not the 13-year-old, because it’s very explicit. Maybe off the record, some of the older ones have read it, and they’re nice, but mostly they don’t care. Like, they care if I’m making chicken or beef for dinner. They care if I’m going to let them do whatever they want or give them the $50 that they want. They do not care about me as an artist. I’ve told Coco not to read the book. I hope she won’t read it until she’s older, just because I don’t think it’s appropriate. But I also don’t want to forbid her from reading it ever, because that’s weird. I think about what it’ll be like for them to read. I definitely keep them out of my work. They’re tempting, because they’re cool. I want to write about them. But I feel like that’s one line I can’t cross. I can’t write about my children. It’s complicated. It’s different from how I feel about drawing on other life experiences that I had, that I might have shared with other people.

Lara Ehrlich  

How’s it playing into the novel you’re working on now? And could you tell us a little bit about that? Are you ready to share a little bit about your work in progress?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I can share a little bit. It’s called The Late Humans of Western New York. And it’s set in an Ithaca-esque town that has a prison and a college. It’s set in an indeterminate amount of time in the future. The main characters are the mayor of the town and his wife, who volunteers at the prison. And the kids in it are five, and they’re very fictional, but I kind of think that’s how I’m managing it—like, the kids are always younger in my fiction than they are in my life when I’m writing it. So, it feels very much like there’s a veil between my experience and my experience of my own children and the fictional children that I’m writing. That’s how I’m managing that.

Lara Ehrlich  

Tell us a little bit about the logistics of writing now that your kids are older. You mentioned how difficult it was when your daughter was between the ages of 1 and 5. What changed after she reached that 5-year mark? And what has the progression of your writing life looked like for the last—I’m bad at math—13 minus five years?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Well, the magical thing that happens when they turn 5 is that they go to school. And that’s huge. You can pay for childcare before then, but something about sending your kids to public school, knowing that they’re out there learning, doing something that’s important for them, not just about giving you time to do what you need to do to work or whatever, for me, created a totally different headspace. But the really magical thing that happens is when they learn to read independently, because then they’re doing something awesome for them. And they’re super engaged, so you feel no guilt at all. And you can do your own thing. 

It ramped up every year. Every developmental phase, I got a little more time and brain space. And I think it’s not just about time for me. Some people can exit parenting and walk right into writing, and that’s a seamless transition for them. For me, the psychic weight of thinking about my family is also important. I married my husband, so I got another caregiver, and he adopted my daughter, who’s now our daughter. So gradually, I got more and more time. 

It’s now possible for me, if I need to, to exit family life for short bursts of time—you know, for 10 days, if I need it. I can have that intense work time, as well as carve out a little space in a given day and a given week. I was a daily writer before she came along. Now I’m not. I write probably four days a week—not necessarily the same days, but I try to get four or five days a week and to spend a little time with my text on the off days, like re-reading or thinking about it, so that I don’t have to restart it again when I return to it. And honestly, with kids this age, I just say this for anyone who has younger kids, it’s not hard. It’s not hard to be a writer and a mom and somebody who works. It works.

Lara Ehrlich  

That is so reassuring to hear. Thank you for saying that. That’s why I think it’s so important to have on the show women who are at all stages of motherhood and writing to hear all of the different perspectives and to share the struggles of the early motherhood with women who are going through it right now, like the last two guests, and then to share with mothers who have a little distance from that time period, although it’s still hard work to be a writer and to be a mother. Whether it’s hard to be both at the same time, that’s a different question, but writing is hard work. And so is parenting. So, thank you for that perspective.

Now, you’ve been through, correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of the different parts of writing a book with a variety of different ages of children. You started The Likely World when your daughter was 5, at that magical time, and you’ve written a book before that, when your daughter was younger. And now you’re drafting a novel again, with older children. Can you talk about the different parts of writing a novel—the generative, thinking part and then the drafting? And then you’ve done 12 revisions of The Likely World. So, talk us through what those different stages of writing a novel look like for you, as a mother, as you’ve moved through all those different ages with your children.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Now that you asked this question, I realize what has radically changed from the before time to the after time is how I compose. 

I used to compose on the page. I was always typing or writing longhand when I was composing. Now, I spend a lot more time in my head and playing around with scenes and even playing around with sentences and words. That’s usually something I do before I go to bed at night. Like when I’m lying in bed, I’m playing with a scene. I do it deliberately, on purpose, because I know it’s productive. And if it gets really good, I get up, and I write it down. 

I’ll pick out a scene for a few weeks and either organically or deliberately, if it’s not happening organically, move on to something else. I’ll get it down on paper, somewhere in that process—not right at the beginning, and I don’t wait until the end. But I’ll keep playing with it. After I’ve written it down, I’ve written a draft. And when something good happens in that space, I get it down on paper. So that’s kind of the composing, the generative part of it. 

I love narration. I just love it. If it was okay to write a novel that was just someone blabbing—this might surprise you, Lara, but that would be what I would write. It would just be someone being like, “Hey, what’s up?” You know, all voice, no plot. I kind of have to push myself to get stuff happening. I have to think a little bit deliberately about like, okay, what’s the conflict here? How is this scene going to generate action? I have to tell myself to do that stuff. 

But eventually, it’ll move out of just the pure, ruminative space and into a set of actions, and they’ll drive the text for a while, and then I’ll get stuck, and I’ll have to ruminate, and usually have to go back and rewrite some stuff to get enough momentum going to push forward the next part of the text. I end up with a draft. I always have the ending, and it always sticks. And I always have the beginning. The middle is murder. So that’s kind of my process.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, I’m with you on the middle being the murder. And plot. I love summary, no dialogue, just taking people through leisurely time and describing characters, and if nothing could happen, that would be amazing for me. We do have time for one more question from a viewer: Could you tell us how you choose your structure? You mentioned a gathered narrative, and Alexis says she’s curious about the non-chronological, off-kilter structure of The Likely World.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

I think almost everything that every writer does comes from their faults and proclivities. We were just talking about how neither one of us really wants to have a plot. And the other thing I really wish could be true, is that all novels were just backstory. I want to tell you how the characters ended up today doing nothing. I’m obsessed with our history. I know everything about all my characters’ histories, and some of that material is so completely compelling that I have to figure out a way to like, sneak as much of it into a narrative with energy and drive towards an end as I can. 

So, the dual time structure really allows me to do that. To create two narratives—or, in this case, four—allows me to have forward motion but still give a big sweep of time. In the book I’m writing now, I think the structural challenge for me is that I have two narrators, and it’s a lot harder to move back and forth in time if you have two narrators. There’s a book, The Topeca School, that came out last year, which is really interesting structurally in terms of how it moves through time. Each chapter travels through lots and lots of time, using the consciousness of the narrator as a vehicle to move through time. 

So: the character is thinking about the past, the character is thinking about two years after that, the character is thinking about the present. And I think that’s a sort of organic way to deal with the same thing. I’m honestly still trying to find the structure that allows me to do what I want to do. I’ll keep negotiating with it. Like, the structure will ask me to do something, and I won’t want to do it. We’ll go back and forth a little bit. Structure usually wins, and I have to give up whatever it is I was trying to do.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you so much, Melanie. And thank you all for tuning in tonight, and again, you can watch this video, listen to the episode as a podcast, or read the interview transcript on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon. Thank you so much, Melanie, for joining us. This has just been a fabulous conversation.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really great to be talking with you and to have so many wonderful people along with us.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely. Have a good night!

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Good night.