Writer Mother Monster: Ann Hood, “When I was in labor, I was judging the Barnes and Noble First Book Award.”

CW: Child loss

“When I was in labor, I was judging the Barnes and Noble First Book Award.”
Ann Hood is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 novels, 4 memoirs, numerous other books, and possibly hundreds of essays. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and is the mother of Sam (27), Annabelle (16), and Grace, who passed away at age 5. In this episode, Ann talks finding a narrative in grief. She also shares stories from her modeling days and her time as a flight attendant, and explains why she describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as “best thing ever.” Find out what a blind fortune teller once told Ann–and if her prophesy came true.

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 as we make space for creative endeavors.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster: Ann Hood

February 2, 2021

Ann Hood is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 novels, 4 memoirs, a short story collection, a 10-book series for middle readers, and 1 young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She is a regular contributor to the Home Economics column in The New York Times Op-Ed page, and her most recent work is Kitchen Yarns, published with W.W. Norton and Company in early 2019. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “best thing ever.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Ann Hood. 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 on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoy the episode, please consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible. And remember to chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio and we’ll weave them into our conversation. 

And now I am very excited to introduce Ann Hood, the New York Times best-selling author of 14 novels, 4 memoirs, a short story collection, a 10-book series for middle readers, and 1 young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She is a regular contributor to the Home Economics column in The New York Times Op-Ed page, and her most recent work is Kitchen Yarns, published with W.W. Norton and Company in early 2019. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “best thing ever.” Please join me in welcoming Ann Hood. 

Ann Hood  

Hi, Lara. 

Lara Ehrlich  

Hi, Ann. Thank you so much for joining me.

Ann Hood  

Oh, this is fun. 

Lara Ehrlich   

I’m so thrilled to finally have a chance to speak with you. I told you when I invited you to come on as a guest that I remembered you so well from Breadloaf and the amazing lectures and talks that you gave there, ones that touched on motherhood and writerhood. We’ll get to that, but first, we were chatting before the interview about what life is like for you right now during this pandemic. Where are you, and where are your children? 

Ann Hood   

We’re in Providence, Rhode Island. We’ve been here pretty much since March 12. I was telling you earlier that we have an apartment in New York, and I spend about half my time there. My husband and I had tickets to the play The Lehman Trilogy, and we’d been waiting for months for this show. My son who lives in Brooklyn called to see what we were doing that night, and I said, “Oh, we’re going to see The Lehman Trilogy.” And he said, “Mom, Broadway just closed,” and I was like, “Oh, no. We’ve got to get out of here.”

We left thinking we’d be gone two weeks or something, you know, and here we are. I’m going back this weekend for the first time since March 12. I’m really excited. I just want to eat Chinese food and walk around my city. We had the opportunity to relocate for three months to a tiny beach town in Massachusetts that nobody knows about—there are no people there and it has beautiful beaches and wildlife and stuff, so we were there for three months. I think that was sort of what saved us during the long, long, long year it’s been. We moved back here in November and are just waiting to get our jabs and start slowly re-entering the world like everyone else. My daughter is with us. She’s 16 and a junior in high school.

Lara Ehrlich 

How old is your son?

Ann Hood  

He’s 27, and he lives in Brooklyn.

Lara Ehrlich  

We were talking a little bit beforehand about what it’s like having your 16-year-old daughter home with you during this pandemic. What has her experience been like, through your eyes?

Ann Hood  

I think I feel probably worse than she does, because she doesn’t really realize all the stuff she’s missing. I so loved being 16 and just being with my girlfriends and being silly and going to the beach. You learn how to drive and sleep over at each other’s houses and eat lots of pizza. I feel bad that she’s not having any of those experiences. I’m really grateful that there’s technology, something I typically try to keep her off, but they’re able to FaceTime as a group, and they have their way of sort of hanging out. She’s in school, all remote. It’s just a weird experience to do high school from bed. But that’s what’s happening.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, that’s a completely different experience than I’m sure she ever expected to have.

Ann Hood  

I’m really hoping that we’re able to look at colleges in the summer and fall. I have all my fingers crossed that it sort of opens up so that we feel safe doing that. Some kids have had to pick colleges online. I want her to have the experience of stepping onto the campus. When I took my son, there were several times where we were in the parking lot and he goes, “Nope. Don’t like it.” There’s some vibe you get, you know? I want to make sure she has that opportunity.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, that’s so true, how you can make those snap judgments at that age. Tell me a bit about yourself at 16. What kind of 16-year-old were you?

Ann Hood  

I was, and probably still am, the epitome of the good girl. Like, I never got in trouble. I never drank. I was the president of everything. I was in every high school play. I was the editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. I was a little bit like Reese Witherspoon in Election. I just wanted to do everything. 

I had a big group of friends that I’m still friends with. I wanted to be a writer. I liked being on the stage. I worked as a model for the Jordan Marsh department store. You’re from Connecticut, so you may remember that was an old New England store. All through high school, I modeled for them. I traveled a lot with this other separate group of my modeling friends, and we traveled all over doing fashion shows and teas with old, kind of waspy women, and we would model different clothes for them to buy, showing the new fashions. That was funny. I was busy. I was that busy, busy kid. I never had a minute where I wasn’t busy.

Lara Ehrlich  

I can identify with that. Definitely. What were your parents like, particularly your mother?

Ann Hood  

I am blessed. I had the best parents of the world. My mom just died, almost three years ago now. She was 86, so I had her for a good, long time, but not long enough. My mom was from an immigrant Italian family, one of 10 kids, and they were all born in the house where I grew up. My great-grandmother bought that house in a little town in Rhode Island in the 1880s, and the family just never left. All that happened is the oldest person would die, and the next oldest would move into the better bedroom. That just kept happening. 

I grew up with a lot of relatives in a big, noisy house. My mother worked, so she had dropped out of school when she was 16. When her dad died, she had to work to help chip in with the family. She went back and got her high school diploma and went to college when I was a kid and worked for the IRS as a tax auditor. And I still will be somewhere in Rhode Island, and I can tell if someone had a good audit or a bad audit by the way they say, “I knew your mother.” 

My dad was from the Midwest, and he was a career Navy man, so we moved around a lot until I was about 10. Then he retired from the Navy and got a job in Boston, so we moved in with my grandmother who we lived with for most of my life.

Lara Ehrlich   

I think anyone who’s read your books can tell that family is vital to you.

Ann Hood  

Yeah. I was the kind of kid who, if I got invited to do something on Sunday, would rather be home with my family than go out with friends or even dates. I just liked family. We always had a big dinner—we called dinner “supper.” We would have a big dinner at, like, two o’clock with all the Italian food and all the Italian relatives. The house wasn’t that big, so it’d be groaning and bursting at the seams. Not enough chairs. I have 21 first cousins on my mother’s side and 24 and my father’s side. My dad’s side was all in Indiana, so I only saw them every couple of years. But my cousins that I grew up with in Rhode Island, we were together all the time.

Lara Ehrlich  

Family is a through line in your work, and so is food. And we’re gonna get to food in a little bit. But first, you talk about your sense of adventure with modeling and traveling and meeting people, and I know you then went on to be a flight attendant, so tell me that about that decision.

Ann Hood  

My dad came from a small kind of farm town in Indiana, and he had a dream of traveling and seeing the world, so he joined the Navy when he was quite young. I grew up listening to his stories about how he learned to ski in Greece and what it was like in Haiti, and before I was born, my parents lived in Naples, Italy, for three years, so they had all these great stories. I think my love of travel came from his wanderlust and living vicariously through his adventures. My mother did not like traveling. She was a real homebody. 

When I was in high school and modeling, I actually made kind of a lot of money, and my girlfriend, Nancy, and I schemed up this plan to take the money and go somewhere. I asked my father if I could travel with Nancy, and he said, “Yeah, you can go anywhere but New York City. It’s too dangerous.”—which is so funny, but it was the ’70s. Nancy and I went to our old French teacher who was a travel agent, and he booked us a trip to Bermuda. We went by ourselves and had the time of our lives. From that time on, I always traveled with girlfriends or my cousins. Before the pandemic, we still took yearly cousin’s trips. 

Travel is just something I’ve always loved to do, so it seemed kind of natural to become a flight attendant, because, you know, when you’re an English major—as I’m guessing maybe you were, too, Lara—there’s not tons of jobs for you. I didn’t want to be a high school teacher or something. I wanted to be a writer. I thought, well, if I’m a flight attendant, I will surely have adventures that will give me more things to write about. Right out of college, I went to work for TWA, and I was a flight attendant for eight years. In fact, my new book that I’m working on is about being a flight attendant. It’s a nonfiction book called Fly Girl.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, I can’t wait to read that. So that experience did give you a lot to write about, it sounds like.

Ann Hood  13:27  

It was everything I hoped it would be. I would have people say, “Oh, how can you do that job?” and “you’re just a glorified waitress.” I never saw it that way. I really liked people, I liked being on the airplane, and there was this wonderful thing where I might, if I did a long flight, be with the 747 full of people for 6 or 8 or 10 hours, but then when I got off that plane, I never saw them again, unlike my friends, who were working in banks or offices or whatever kind of jobs they had and working with the same people every day. Somebody could be kind of obnoxious or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because I’m never gonna see them again. 

I got to travel a lot and have a lot of fun adventures, and it actually helped me become a writer and in a lot of ways—one is that you don’t work a nine-to-five job. I would work two or three days and then have three or four days off, so I had a lot of time to spend writing. I didn’t go get an MFA or anything, but I did take writing workshops and stuff. It allowed me the opportunity.

Lara Ehrlich  

What was the first novel that you wrote? Not the first one that you published. Did you have one that you shelved?

Ann Hood  

Shelved? It went into a dumpster on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. It was called The Betrayal of Sam Pepper. I don’t remember what this woman, who was my neighbor and also another flight attendant, had done, but she kind of made me mad, so it was sort of a revenge tale. I did everything a first novelist does, like the name of the book kind of rhymed with her real name, and I just changed a few details. I was handwriting it mostly on the airplane in notebooks, and then one summer, I said, “I’m going to reread this and finish this book. I’m gonna finish it.” And I read, like, 40 pages and was like, this is the worst thing ever written. I picked up all those pages, and I walked outside, and I threw it in the dumpster. And I went back upstairs, and I started writing what actually did become my first book. That was my starter book.

Lara Ehrlich  

I think we can all relate to the starter book. It’s then whether you write the next one that counts.

Ann Hood  

Or if you can let go of it. I find sometimes with students that they just can’t let go of that first one. And I always tell them that story like, okay, you know, I kind of taught myself to write by writing that book.

Lara Ehrlich  

Tell me, why is it important to let go? How do you know when it’s time to let go of a book that’s not working?

Ann Hood  

I wasn’t someone who was sending out a lot of stories. I did write some stories. Before there was email, you put them in the self-addressed stamped envelope and have little index cards that kept track but in a very limited way. That was mostly because I didn’t think what I was writing was publishable. I’m my own worst critic, and I just held a very high bar. In a way, I wish I had kept that terrible novel, because I would love to see how awful it is. If I read F. Scott Fitzgerald, it kind of sounded like that. And then of course, it was the ‘80s, and I discovered Raymond Carver, so that completely changed the tone, and all the people were different. I just imitated everything I read. If I got stuck, I would read a book, and I would write in the book how the writer did it. And I just kept doing that. Things you’re told at writing workshops—"start with action” or whatever—I just figured out by reading so many books where I realized, oh, these mostly start in a scene with action. I was very self-taught. I’m an autodidact. But I think if you’re a reader, you kind of know when what you’re writing is not so good.

Lara Ehrlich  

Especially if you’re holding yourself up to F. Scott Fitzgerald! So, you knew you wanted to be a writer. Did you know you wanted to be a mother?

Ann Hood  

I did not want to be a mother. 

Lara Ehrlich  

Really? Tell me why.

Ann Hood  

Not for any reason. As I said, I had a totally happy childhood. I loved my 20s. I was the happiest flight attendant. I was writing. I sold my book in my 20s. I just couldn’t see how kids would fit into my life. I had a long-term boyfriend who I adored, and we had this very distant, fuzzy idea of having kids someday, but it wasn’t something we talked about a lot or planned. I never had that biological clock ticking thing. I just thought I was happy. Once I decided to have a baby, then I was all on board, and it wasn’t a hard decision. I guess the time was just right for me. Once I had one, I wanted, like, five. I just loved it.

Lara Ehrlich  

It’s interesting, I’ve heard from women on the show who’ve had that biological clock and others who, like you said, were waiting for that to happen. I was in that latter category, too. I just never could figure out how a child would fit into a life as a writer. How did being a mother change your experience of being a writer?

Ann Hood  

Well, I had no time. Because I was a writer for so long without children, I used to do whatever I wanted when I wanted. If I wanted to stay up all night writing, that was fine. If I wanted to not go out, lock myself away for a few days and finish a project, that was fine. If I wanted to drink in the afternoon, that was fine. Anything was fine! And all of a sudden, it’s like, oh my goodness, this is gonna be a challenge. 

I had made the decision that I wasn’t going to be a parent whose baby changed their life and dictated their life. I wanted kids to be part of the life I had built, because I thought I built this really fun, exciting life, and I thought they should fit into it. I know a lot of people have different ideas, and that’s all fine, but that’s how I felt. 

From the time my son was a baby, I was taking him all over the world with me. I was taking him on book tours. The kids have had a pretty exciting childhood, traditional in some ways but different in other ways. When I was in labor, I was judging the Barnes and Noble First Book Award. I guess I just said, these things have got to coexist. I will put him in those little chairs that you can bounce and bounce it with my foot and write my novels or essays or whatever I was working on.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, so making time when you can.

Ann Hood  

I think pretty quickly, once he was past being a toddler and went off to two hours three times a week to school, I retrained to myself to write when those hours opened up. I think so many women do that. I read an essay by Anne Tyler once in which she said that she would take her kids to school in her pajamas, get them out of the car, and run home to write and then pick them up. You know, all the other moms were like, “Are you still doing that writing thing?” Because she wouldn’t sit around and chat, because she knew she had that many hours. I think a lot of women who are writers and mothers have learned to do that same thing. It’s like naptime. Okay I can write. Or a playdate. I can write for three hours or whatever.

Lara Ehrlich  

Before the interview, I had asked if I might ask you a little bit about loss and grief, and that might be a good transition here to that. I know that you gave birth twice. And you had a daughter named Grace. Can you tell us a little bit about her?

Ann Hood  22:23  

Grace and Sam are three years apart. She was one of those kids who make adults laugh because she had this very deep voice, very raspy, and she had a very dark personality for a little person. She was this pale blond, big blue eyes, looked like a little sweet thing, and she was sort of from The Addams Family. Dark personality. When she was 4, she found on my shelf a collection of Charles Addams cartoons. She loved them. She memorized them all. She thought they were the funniest things. And here’s her big brother, like not really understanding that—like, “Why is that funny? That’s awful. You know, Grace, that’s terrible.” I remember one of my uncles died, and he was quite old, and we were going to pay a visit to my aunt, and I said, “Okay, so when you see your aunt, she’s gonna be really sad, so you tell her that you’re sorry.” And Grace, just completely flat voice, “Well, I’m not sorry. I didn’t kill him.” She kept us laughing. My son still says she was the funniest person he knew. 

She also really loved the Beatles. I’m completely responsible for that. Because when I had Sam, I had never held a baby. I never babysat. I mentioned, I have dozens of cousins, but I was on the younger end, so I had never really been around babies until I had one, and it never occurred to me that there were people making songs for children, like “Baby Beluga” and things. I didn’t know anything about that. I always just sang Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell—the things I like—so the kids kind of grew up with that music instead of good music. Not on purpose. I wasn’t trying to make a point or have them develop a taste. It was just all I knew. And she just loved the Beatles as much as I did. And so that was kind of our special thing. She always loved the really dark songs. It was so funny. She loved them. “I need a place to hide away,” which is really kind of a sad song, or “Eleanor Rigby.” She liked the dark ones. She was also a little artist. She took drawing and painting classes at an art studio from the time she was 4, and she would just sit and draw. She was very focused and task oriented.

Lara Ehrlich  

She sounds like such a character.

Ann Hood

She was a character. She really was.

Lara Ehrlich  

I know this is hard to tell. Well, it’s hard for me to ask you about because I have a 4-year-old, as I mentioned. But can you tell us what happened to Grace?

Ann Hood  

Yeah, so when she was 5, she got a form of strep. It’s the same thing that strep throat causes, and everybody in her school had strep throat. It was just kind of going around. But hers went rogue. They call it galloping strep. It’s actually what, I believe, Jim Henson of the Muppets also died of. What happens is it sort of bypasses your throat and attacks your organs. I’m not sure that it was what caused rheumatic fever, but I think they’re connected somehow. So basically, it damaged her heart. But it all happened super fast. I mean, she got a fever, and she died 36 hours later. 

And very, very typical with this, when strep does this, you don’t even take them to the doctors, because how many times do kids get fevers and they’re just kind of lethargic. But she was acting super weird. It was enough to have me kind of sit up and take notice. And when I called the doctor, she said, “Go to the ER,” which was weird, because it was during the day, and she was in the office. And she later said, “I could hear the panic in your voice, and I knew something was really wrong.” She wasn’t diagnosed right away, but it really wouldn’t have mattered. They checked for meningitis and pneumonia and all sorts of things, and then they said she was fine, and they were gonna keep her overnight for observation, and pretty quickly, when she got into that regular room, she turned critical and was rushed to go to the ICU, where we kind of stayed for a day and a half. They worked really valiantly to try to save her.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m so sorry.

Ann Hood  

It was in 2002. As long ago as it was, in many ways, it still feels like it just happened. You know, a funny thing with all loss is you feel very present. But of course, I have a lot of moments where I’m writing a date or something, and I realize how old she would be now, and it just takes my breath away, you know, to never know what she would have accomplished or become, you know?

Lara Ehrlich  

There were a few years after that when it was impossible to write, right?

Ann Hood  

Yeah, I didn’t write for about two years. I remember a really wise writer friend of mine said, “Of course you can’t write, because we write to make sense of things, and there is no sense to what happened.” Your mind can’t even try to make sense of it. 

I think, too, a lot of it was just shock. I don’t remember a lot about that first year. Another really wise friend of mine suggested I learn to knit. I am such a type A personality, straight-A student, and the only class I could not do well in was home economics. Sewing. I couldn’t make my wraparound skirt. From the time I was 14, I stayed away from anything crafty, but I thought knitting—great—anything to get me out of my head. Like, I need help. 

So about six months after Grace died, I learned to knit, and I became an obsessive knitter. I knit full-time for a year. I was a terrible knitter. But at least what I found was that I had to focus, and I think that kind of got my brain working again. 

Tin House, the literary journal, was doing a special issue on lying. I was on their mailing list because I had published a couple essays or stories or something with them, and I get this call for submissions online. I went out to dinner that night with a friend that I was like, “I’m gonna just block them. I’m not writing, and I don’t want people to ask me to write,” and he was like, “Well, they didn’t ask you; they asked a bunch of people.” I said okay, okay. But then he said, “I think you could write a lot about lying. Every time we talk, you tell me about the things people say about grief that aren’t true.” And although I kind of dismissed it, I woke up that night and had this voice in my head, like “the things that weren’t true” story. 

So, I just wrote it, read it through once, sent it off, and then went into a complete panic attack. I sent it to another writer friend, and she, very kindly, called Tin House and said, “If you’re going to reject this, tell me and I’ll do it for you, because she’s very fragile.” And he said, “I just read it. We’re taking it.” 

So that ran in Tin House, and very quickly, I wrote an essay about knitting and grief that ran in Real Simple, and then I didn’t write again for another year. I was knitting, which is pretty much all I did, and I would take my son to school. I was determined for him to still have a happy childhood, although he was crushed. I went to all the things, brought pizza on Pizza Day, did all the things. But whenever I didn’t have to do that, I would just sit and knit and grieve. 

One day I was knitting and thought, I wish I could teach everybody how to knit, because there would be no more war, everybody would have lower blood pressure, and we’d all have mittens and scarves. It would be great. It’d be the perfect thing. And then I laughed, and I was like, Oh, yeah, like you could teach other people to knit. And I kept knitting. And then I thought, wait a minute. I could write a book that shows how knitting helps people. Not a nonfiction book but a novel. And this idea just kept spinning in my head, like the spin cycle in your washing machine. I called my agent and said, “I’m gonna write a novel,” and she started to cry. She said, “I knew you would write again,” and asked what it was about. I said, “Knitting,” and there was this giant pause, and she said, “People knitting for like, 300 pages?” And she’s like, “Um, okay.” 

Even though it was such a half-baked idea, I just felt on fire that I could write this. I sat down, and I wrote on post-it notes all the facets of grief. Then I looked at them all, and I chose the ones that I thought were the most interesting and created a character to sort of reflect that emotion. Like I had hope and love and resignation and regret, and then I made up characters to personify those things. And that was The Knitting Circle.

Lara Ehrlich  

In a talk you gave at Breadloaf, you told us a variation of this story about losing Grace and about finding your way back to writing through knitting, and then there was a moment—I think the moment where you said that she had died—that you had to stop and catch your breath. And at the end, you said that that moment never gets easier. Why do you feel that it’s important to share that depth of grief with audiences, and how do you prepare yourself to actually speak those words that are so raw, still. 

Ann Hood  

I guess there’s a couple answers to that. The first is that I never thought I would write about Grace. Fiction was one thing, because I change so much. It’s not really my story, it’s a grief story, but I also see it as a story of friendship, because my friends lifted me up. For years, they still continue to. I thought I would never write nonfiction about it, and I had written those two essays, and over the course of writing The Knitting Circle and when it first came out, I would have this idea about grief as if I figured out one little, tiny piece of it. I’d write an essay about that little, tiny piece. 

A couple of those essays won Pushcart prizes and things like that, and my agent and editor suggested that I collect them and make them a narrative, rather than separate essays. I didn’t want to do it, because I don’t want to expose this, and I don’t want to make money off of Grace’s death. I had all these ideas about why I didn’t want to do it, and they kind of let it go. Some time passed, and we were having lunch together again, and they brought it up again. When I was resistant, one of them said, “You always tell us about the emails you’re getting. Clearly, you’re reaching people with this.” Something about that comment made me think about how I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to read that helped me, and I was desperate. I tried everything. I thought, if I write the book that I wish I had, then it might help people. And so that convinced me. 

I had a fellowship set up to go to Yaddo, so I went with all these essays and figured out how to connect them, and that book is Comfort. So that’s the first question about how I thought I would never write about it. 

The Knitting Circle and Comfort kind of overlap, so I was talking about this for about three years. I remember before I went on the book tour, my friends sitting me down and saying, “What are you going to do? Let’s pick a section that you’re going to read, and you will always read that section.” I kind of read it over and over to myself so that it became, in a way, like reading the phone book, like they were just words. A lot of the tour for those two books included grief groups and fundraisers for hospice centers and hospitals. It was a lot of hearing people’s grief stories. It was really very, very hard. And it just kept going. It just went on and on. 

Finally, things slowed down a bit, and I could catch my breath. But then the story was out there, so I found myself still being asked about it or talking about it. I’ve had so many people—hundreds, maybe more—say, “You’re expressing what I don’t know how to say,” or “you wrote about something that I couldn’t explain,” or people would say they gave the book to their mother or friend or husband. For me, that made it worthwhile, although it’s always hard, and often after I talk about it, I feel a little weird or sad or something. 

Lara Ehrlich  

I know, and I’m sorry if I made you feel that way.

Ann Hood  

No, no. It’s a funny thing, Lara. I don’t think I’ve ever told this story before because I kind of put it into the back of my brain, but we went to Northern California because we were just doing all kinds of things to try to feel better, and I had this wonderful ex-sister-in-law—I still love her to pieces—who lived there, and I was asking people if they could find a medium that was real, like not a phony-baloney one. She got me an appointment with this woman in San Francisco. I remember going up these steps, like in the Mission or somewhere, and the woman was quite old, and she was blind, and she would paint while she channeled whatever. I do love a lot of that stuff, but I was sitting there going, “This is not what I need. This is not gonna make me feel better.” 

She didn’t know anything about me, and she looked up and said, “You are going to write something that’s going to affect thousands and thousands of people.” And I was thinking, I can’t even put my pants on. Like, this woman’s crazy. And she said, “That’s all I can tell you. You are going to give people a gift.” She didn’t know I was a writer. I kind of pushed that away, because I was so resistant. When people would tell me “write it down, write it down,” and when I couldn’t write, it was so frustrating, you know? I think I had her in that category. But it’s weird. I think that woman was on to something.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely. Can you talk about finding a narrative in motherhood? Maybe starting with grief, but it doesn’t have to be. How do you find that narrative in writing?

Ann Hood  

It’s so funny, because before I had children, I still wrote about motherhood, I think because I’m so family-oriented, and I came from that big family. The thing that interests me is relationships between mothers and daughters; sisters—I don’t even have a sister, but women. More than love stories, I like the women’s stories. Every time I would write a book, my mother would say to me, “Another bad mother. Everybody’s gonna think I’m the worst mother. I don’t like that.” They’re not bad mothers; they’re flawed. That’s what we do. Then once I had kids, I’m not sure that it changed that much, except I was a better writer. I think I could explore things more deeply anyway. 

Lately, I’ve been writing about a lot about women who have given up children. In the novel I’m working on now, someone as a teenager gave up a baby. I think it’s just one more way of looking at loss and grief, without, once again, revisiting the story.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, yeah, and that touches on the fact that then you adopted a daughter, Annabelle, right?

Ann Hood

I did. That was maybe one of the top three decisions of my life. I remember I was driving, and Sam was in the backseat. He used to love Transformers, and he had this thing called Optimus Prime. They cost a zillion dollars, and they manipulate them all the time. It becomes a monster or whatever. He would always have one of those. And it was kind of quiet, and I looked in the rearview mirror and the thing was sitting on his lap, and he was looking out the window, crying. He was, like, 10. And I thought, “I am going to fix this family.” I don’t know if you ever saw the movie Raising Arizona, but Holly Hunter is like, “I’m going to get me a baby, baby.” 

I just had this realization that one of the many wonderful things about babies is that they demand your attention, and I couldn’t be so selfish and caught up in myself and my sadness if there was a baby who needed to eat. From that day, I pretty quickly decided to adopt a baby from China. 

At the time, it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t hard. A lot of people were doing it. A woman in our neighborhood who had done it, so we went and talked to her. It took nine months, from when we went to the orientation until we went to China to get Annabelle, who’s from Hunan. She was 11 months old when we adopted her, and it’s been the best thing.

Lara Ehrlich  

Did adopting a child change your perspective on motherhood and writing about motherhood?

Ann Hood  

That’s a really interesting question. When we were waiting, people would ask me, “How do you know this is gonna work?” or “what if” this and “what if” that, and none of those questions came into my mind. I just got the idea, and it just felt right. 

I remember when we picked up the babies. We were traveling with maybe 10 families, and it was really interesting because many of those families already had children, so there were tons of kids. Sam was there and somebody else had two kids, so there were just a bunch of kids in this big, noisy bus. We’re on our way to pick up the babies in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, and we were going to a city hall—like this gray, really ugly, nondescript building. We walked in, and all you heard were babies crying. There were, like, I don’t know—100 families picking up babies that day. We were ushered into a room to wait, and people kept rushing past us down the hall, and I said, “There went Annabel! A woman has Annabelle. There she is.” They’d sent us a picture. 

Then, not too long after that, they called us in, and there were all these babies and all the parents, and they would just call your name, and you’d get up, and they’d hand you this baby. It was so weird. But I remember when they handed me the baby, in that moment, I had one thought: I would kill for this baby. I would do anything. Like, it was immediate. This baby’s my baby.

Lara Ehrlich  

Is that the same feeling you had when you had Sam and Grace?

Ann Hood  

I think so. I was so freaked out when I had Sam. First of all, he was born in, like, 20 minutes.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh my gosh.

Ann Hood  

I was like, “Wait—I have a baby? I thought this was supposed to go on a little longer.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, wow. And here you brought your manuscripts with you to read and everything.

Ann Hood  

Yeah, exactly. Well, I was put in the hospital because they detected some issue, so I was there. I was fine. I had to judge that contest, and it was like two days after I had him that I had a call that Joyce Carol Oates was on, because she was one of the judges. It was surreal. He had to be born fast. They’d given me Pitocin, but it didn’t work. Nothing happened. They’re like, “Oh, we might send you home. But there might be this problem.” Everyone was talking and trying to decide what to do. 

Hours passed, like six hours, and all of a sudden, I don’t feel very good. And they’re still like, “What should we do? Should we do another sonogram?” Blah, blah. And I’m like, “I really feel weird.” And I remember the midwife looking at me and going, “The baby’s coming!” 

Pretty much, that that was it. I’m calling from the hospital, saying, “Sam is born,” and people are like, “What?!” It was funny. As I’d said, I’d never held a baby, but I immediately felt protective and in love. Some people say you have to get to know him. I didn’t have that feeling with my kids. I just looked at them and was like, “Woah. You’re great.” We taught each other a lot stuff.

Lara Ehrlich  

I was in the same boat. I had held one friend’s baby once, and I didn’t like it. I remember I was like, “I don’t want to break it. I don’t know what to do.” You definitely have to learn as you go, I think. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember this, but did you ever write about birth?

Ann Hood

I don’t think so. There was a wonderful anthology—I’m embarrassed that I can’t think of the name of it [Labor Day]—that Eleanor Henderson edited, about people having babies, but I feel like I wrote about adoption.

Lara Ehrlich  

Interesting.

Ann Hood  

And there was another one that Helen Schulman and Jill Bialosky edited many years ago when Sam was a baby, and it was called Wanting a Child. Everybody wrote about wanting to have babies, infertility … I wrote about being a stepparent. I was in both those books, but I wrote off-topic, if I’m remembering correctly.

Lara Ehrlich  

What were your expectations of motherhood? And how did the reality of motherhood match up with your expectations?

Ann Hood  

I kind of saw it as a grand adventure, which I think it is. There were times, especially when Sam and Grace were little, when I can remember being in a grocery store, and they were just off the wall, being bad and running. They were those kids that you stare at their mother. I remember thinking, no, this isn’t what this is supposed to be. I don’t like this part. They were pretty much all good kids and did what they were supposed to do and were creative and fun. I had a lot of fun with them. But there were those moments when it was like, this isn’t what I signed up for. But mostly, I just always thought of it as an adventure. 

I have pictures from recently, where my son comes home, and they still all get in bed with me and we have coffee. I don’t know if it’s what I imagined, but it’s what I’d hoped.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, that’s great. I love that. Here’s the craft question for you. I’ve noticed, especially with your lectures and talks, that you choose an item to focus the narrative around. There was this great talk that you gave at Tin House once, essentially about your brother, but it was about his car and this relationship with his car. In another talk, you talked about tomato pie, but it was really about your mother. From a craft perspective, can you talk about why you made those choices?

Ann Hood  

I think as writers we do a lot of things unintentionally or accidentally. We’re doing something right, but we don’t know the name for it, or we couldn’t really explain how we do it or why we do it. At some point, many years ago, I read a T.S. Eliot essay about why Hamlet was a failure and Macbeth was a successful play. It was kind of dryly written, but I just thought the idea was so interesting. He called it the objective correlative, which is using an object or an event to take the place of the emotion you’re trying to write about. He said Hamlet gets up there, “to be or not to be,” and he just talks and thinks out loud and goes on and on. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is washing her hands, and we all know: guilt. She doesn’t need to talk and pontificate about it. He had other examples from the two plays, but that’s the most obvious one. 

I started reading more about that, and then looking at things I liked and seeing how it was used in that way, whether or not writers did it intentionally or called it that. It’s a technique that I have found over and over just works, especially in essays. 

My brother’s car was a Volkswagen Bug. This was, like, 1970. Everybody had them. Every teenager or young person. They used to cost $500. And great colors—they were like jellybeans. The essay came about not because of my brother’s car but because I saw an orange Volkswagen bug, and I just wanted to own it. And like I don’t like cars. I don’t like driving. I like being the passenger, so I can knit or read and not have to focus. I don’t know the difference between a Honda and a Toyota. They all look the same to me. It was just so weird that I saw that car and was like, I want that car. It was used and $6,000, which is the exact amount of money I had to redo my kitchen. I’m like, what is wrong with me? I have two kids. I couldn’t barely fit the car seat in the back of a Bug. Poor Annabelle’s legs. I was like, what was I thinking? I really wasted money. 

One night, when I really couldn’t sleep over the $6,000, I remembered my brother’s car. I remembered the summer he came home with that car and all his college friends came, and they all had Volkswagen Bugs, and how if one of them had to leave and he was blocked in, they would get up and just pick up the cars and rearrange them like pieces on a chessboard. I remember that there was so much more to that summer. I was 12 or something, and to those boys, I was kind of their mascot. They gave me books to read, and they’d come and hang out if my brother wasn’t home yet, and they’d take me for a frozen lemonade or teach me to play frisbee or take me to the beach. I just was a tagalong, but they kind of liked talking to me. One of them took me to see the play Hair, and my father almost killed him because I was, like, 12, you know, and they get all naked in Hair. But I’ve always thought of that summer as the most special summer of my life, in a way, because they opened my eyes to so many things.

 It was a very political time with the Vietnam War. They were all up for the draft lottery that year. I heard them discussing politics, which helped me form what I felt about politics of the country, where I landed on different issues, and the books and theater and all of it made it a very important summer for me. 

I realized that’s why I bought that car, so the essay that came from that, “Boys of Summer,” was in the New York Times in the op-ed page. They would run occasional essays on that page in the summer, and it was very summer focused. There’s just a little bit at the end about me buying this car, maybe to feel the way I felt that summer again. That’s a great example of the objective correlative, where a car stands in for that emotion of that magic.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and it just unfolds from there into politics and puberty and all of these things. It’s beautiful. Shifting us back to motherhood for a second. Your son’s 27 now, and then you have a 16-year-old daughter at home. Can you talk us through how writing motherhood has changed, and what it’s like for you now? Are you finding that you have a little more time to write? Are there different demands?

Ann Hood  

This is sort of a backwards way to answer your question, but my son, from the time he was 8, acted in community theater, semiprofessional, and professional theater. That kid was gone a lot. He’d have rehearsals, and parents weren’t allowed. He was the busiest kid because he was auditioning for one thing, rehearsing for another, in another play. He was in a traveling theater company that did musical fairytales at those giant, open air-theaters, like on Cape Cod, those things. He was gone a lot, so I always felt I had a lot of time to write because I knew Sam’s at rehearsal or whatever. 

With the pandemic, Annabelle is spending all her time with two middle-aged people—poor kid—but basically, when she’s in school, I know I can sit down and write. She doesn’t want to always hang out with me. She always wants to have dinner with us, she loves playing games, cards and stuff, with us, but she also wants to go talk to her friends, as she should. I wish she could be out with them. I actually do have a lot of writing time. 

I remember when my kids were littler, I would say, “You can’t come in this room for an hour.” I think it gets easier when they’re older.

Lara Ehrlich  

That’s what I’ve heard. How did it work when they were younger? I feel like women are still struggling to do that—to close the door and say, “This is my time.” Did you feel that conflict?

Ann Hood  

You know, Lara, I never did. I think it’s because I was an established writer. By the time I had my first kid, I already had written six books or something, and I had columns in magazines, and I got a column in a magazine right after he was born in a parenting magazine. I was always working. But I will tell you, you’re saying something so true, and it makes me sad. I have so many women students from places like Breadloaf or conferences or classes with me, and they just feel guilty writing. They don’t think they’ve earned it because they haven’t published yet. I’ve had women tell me that their husbands have said they could write for one year, and if you don’t finish it or the book doesn’t sell, then it’s not for you. We know that’s not how writing works or publishing. It really makes me feel bad. It makes me feel bad that in 2021, women are still feeling guilty about their dream or their work or their passion. 

I never felt that. From when Sam was quite young, I was always a firm believer in the babysitter. We lived right near Brown University, and they just had a bulletin board with little paper you ripped off. I called up every kid, like, “Come. I need to work.” There were periods of times where we had a live-in nannies but always babysitters I just loved it, and I think it’s great for your kid to be with a teenager and to go play around with whatever they’re doing and get out of the house with younger people. I would say we’re still very close to probably 60-70% of those babysitters we had over all these years. 

Just the other day, Sam’s first babysitter, who babysat him for many years, was cleaning out some stuff and found pictures—pictures of her and Sam painting their faces or something. I just think it expands the kid. I have friends whose children never had a babysitter. Never. And I’m like, whoa. First of all, how do you do that? I guess I’m kind of selfish, and maybe it’s because I had kids when I was slightly older, but I wanted to go to the movies, you know? I wanted to go to see a play or go to for a weekend somewhere.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, that’s all important to do, right? I think you made some really important points to echo. One is that it expands a child’s world to have more than just their parents watching them. My daughter spends a lot of time with her grandparents, and I struggle with some guilt when my parents are watching her for quite a lot of the day, but she’s so happy, and they’re happy.

Ann Hood  

Oh, I feel like children are a great gift to our parents. That is really true. My dad was Sam’s first babysitter. I used to teach in New York at NYU, I think it was a Tuesday class, and I would take Sam to his little nursery school when he was 2 or 3. Then, I would go to New York, and my class was at four or five, and I would spend the night, come back the next day, my dad would pick them up at school, and he’d spend the night with my parents, and they didn’t want to relinquish him. When I’d go back, they’d be like, “You’re back already?” That is such a gift for your children. Somebody told me once, you should have a friend from every decade, and if your parents are in their 60s or 70s, and they’ve got a friend who’s 4, I think that’s pretty great.

Lara Ehrlich

I think so, too. I also want to echo that in hearing you talk about your writing, you refer to it as your work. “Close the door. I’m working.” I think that’s valuable for listeners to hear that. I feel this conflict to when I’m doing my day job and I’m making that paycheck, and I have deadlines and all these things, it is much easier to close the door and say I have to do work, because that is considered work by society. Whereas when I close the door and say I’m working on a novel that may or may not ever sell and might not get finished, then it’s easier to dismiss it as your hobby or your passion or whatever and not worthy of closing the door for. What would you say to that?

Ann Hood  

I totally hear what you’re saying, and I know so many women have that conflict. I think that work—and your passion—doesn’t always make money. I think we will not be valued unless we value ourselves and what we’re doing, and I always valued that time and saw the value in it. Like I had said earlier, I used to take my kids on book tours with me, because I wanted them to see what I do. I wanted them to see that people show up. When I go and say, “I’m doing this thing,” even if it isn’t in a magazine or doesn’t become a book, I go places and I sign the books, and I do have people come and talk to me. Sometimes there’s four people in the room, and sometimes it’s 400 people. I always wanted them to see it. 

It reached a point, where Annabelle’s like, “Are you going to do that one talk again? I’m not coming.” But it was always important that they value what I do. The only way you cannot value it—not you personally, but anyone—is by thinking of it as a hobby or something not worthwhile, but if you see it as worthwhile, then it is.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’ve had women on the show who have younger kids, and when asked what they want their kids to think about their writing someday, it’s a very aspirational question. But you can actually ask your kids what they think of you as a writer and mother, so what do they think?

Ann Hood   

I think my son completely loves that I’m a writer because it allowed him to pursue acting. I never once said, “You can’t major in theater” or “you’re wasting your time” or “that’s your hobby.” He wanted to be an actor, and I got it, because I’m an artist, too. He was shocked when someone said to him once, “Your mother’s gonna let you major in theater in college?” He couldn’t imagine that someone wouldn’t. I think it really is fun. 

Actually, Sam and I and his girlfriend did a project during the pandemic during the summer, where we recorded writers craft talks and started a company called Craft Talks, where you can buy unlimited access to six writers—Andre Dubus III, Laura Lippman, six of us. We did it together because he knew how frustrated I was that I couldn’t teach in person, and that my friends and other writers I respected couldn’t either. I think he gets it. All of that said, he’s never read anything I’ve written.

Lara Ehrlich  

Really?

Ann Hood  

No. And I teach, typically each summer but not last summer, in Ireland at a wonderful writers’ conference there, and he has come a couple times. I read an essay that I had read before, about Grace, and it slayed him. He said, “This is why I can’t read your stuff.” He has no interest. 

Annabelle reads things, she edits, and she’s brutal. She’s like, “I just read the first five pages. I wouldn’t read this book. It’s not exciting. It’s not interesting.” I’m like, okay. But then she’ll sit down, and she can back it up. She’s a great editor, a great person to run ideas by. When Kitchen Yarns came out, she’s in a couple of the essays, and she went right to those and read them. She doesn’t want to be a writer, but I think they appreciate what I do. I can I hear them, when they introduce me to their friends or whatever, that they’re proud, because they know it’s hard to be a writer, that you sit with nothing and you make something.

Lara Ehrlich   

Yeah, and it sounds like you really let them into that process and took them along with you, so they have a respect for it. Has Annabelle said that she’s gotten to know a different part of you through reading your writing?

Ann Hood  

You know, she hasn’t said that, no. She has said, “Oh, I didn’t look at that that way,” or “I didn’t see it that way,” but not that it was wrong. She’s read my kids’ books. There’s an age when I was writing them to match her age, and she gave me some good ideas to add in. But no, she’s just pretty blunt.

Lara Ehrlich  

Everyone needs a good editor.

Ann Hood  1:07:38  

In Providence, we live in a loft, so it’s just completely open. The bedrooms have doors, but there’s no place to go if we’re not in our bedrooms. We’re all in the same big loft area. But I’m writing at the table, and she comes out of her room and she’ll look and read and say, “Oh, what is this? Is this novel? Oh, that’s cool. That’s interesting.” She’s interested in process.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, that’s so fascinating. What does she want to be, if not a writer?

Ann Hood  

She loves languages. She went to a French school, so she’s fluent in French. She takes Italian now. She has toyed with the idea of doing something with languages, but she also loves science, so she’s thought about translating science stuff. The liberal arts. Those are the things she likes. She also likes math.

Lara Ehrlich  

Did you love math?

Ann Hood  

I remember when I was knitting something once, and it involved counting and subtracting, and I looked at my knitting teacher and said, “You never told me I was gonna have to do math. I would not have started.” Sometimes even simple math, I’ll sit and do it over and over and still get it wrong.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, me, too. I tried to tutor children once after school, and I thought it would be all language arts and history, and I had to help a second grader with subtraction and I couldn’t do it.

Ann Hood  

I’m with you. I think it was just this morning, I was reminding Annabelle when she was little how she used to always say, “Can you homeschool me?” And I’d say I can’t because you have to be socializing. You have to learn math. You must go to school.

Lara Ehrlich  

That was a good decision. I’ll end just with a few comments here from some of our listeners. Trudy says, “You have amazing children.” I’ll share a few others. “A friend from every decade—I absolutely love that!” I agree, a friend from every decade is one of the best takeaways. Let’s all cultivate that.

Ann Hood  

Yeah, definitely.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much, Ann, for coming today and for sharing your stories with us and for going into some difficult subjects and for your honesty and openness. It was so great talking to you.

Ann Hood   

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. The time flew by.

Lara Ehrlich  

It really did.

Ann Hood  

Thank you, everybody, for listening in.