Writer Mother Monster: Kim McLarin, "Writing was a way of imposing myself, of making a world that was hostile and wanted to render me invisible or dead acknowledge me and deal with me."

“Writing was a way of imposing myself, of making a world that was hostile and wanted to render me invisible or dead acknowledge me and deal with me.”
(April 22, 2021) Kim McLarin is a journalist, playwright, novelist, memoirist, literary critic, essayist, and co-author of a memoir by Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz. She has two children, ages 21 and 23, and describes writer motherhood in three words as “contradictory, depleting, enriching.” In this episode, Kim talks about writing to change the world, navigating the expectations of white-middle-class motherhood, why writing seems less urgent now than in her youth, and why she “didn’t expect to be loved by America.”

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

Kim McLarin

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Kim McLarin. Thank you all for tuning in. Please remember to chat with us during the interview. Your comments will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. And if you enjoy the episode, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness to help keep this podcast going. 

Without further ado, I’m excited to introduce Kim. Kim McLarin is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels, the memoir Divorce Dog: Motherhood, Men, & Midlifeand Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Life and Love. Her most recent book is a critical and personal examination of a favorite novel: James Baldwin's Another Country. McLarin's nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Slate, The Root and other publications. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Greensboro News & Record, and The Associated Press. She is an associate professor and graduate program director of the MFA in Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. Kim has two children, ages 21 and 23, and describes writer motherhood in three words as “contradictory, depleting, enriching.” Now, please join me in welcoming Kim McLarin. Hi, Kim. 

Kim McLarin 

Hi, Lara. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich

Of course. Thank you so much for joining me. I want to start by asking you about the three words you use to describe writer mothers: contradictory, depleting, and enriching.

Kim McLarin

Wow, those were off the top of my head because it was an intriguing question that you asked me. So let me see. My children are grown, so I don’t process it in the same way I did when they were young. When thinking about motherhood and writing, I cast myself back into how I felt when my kids were young and I was trying to write, and the first word was “contradictory” because motherhood requires being present, being available, being self-sacrificing, and being a writer requires being absent from other people, because you need to be by yourself. I also wanted to acknowledge that other side, because I think often it’s not acknowledged. That is also what the third novel is about: the sanctification of motherhood and the refusal to acknowledge that sometimes it’s kind of sucky. Sometimes it’s hard.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, hard but joyful. And it can exist as both sometimes at the same time. Tell me a little bit more about that novel and how you worked through those issues and questions for yourself in the writing of it.

Kim McLarin

It’s so long ago now, I can barely remember, but at the time, it was so overwhelming. That was my third novel. And I had another idea. Originally, I started writing a different novel, and I just couldn’t. My kids were still pretty young and at home—my daughter might have been in kindergarten or first grade—and I was at home with them. I had moved to a new city, Boston, so I didn’t have a lot of family, I didn’t have a lot of help or support, so it felt like it was all me. I was married, but my husband was working. 

The novel evolved out of my experience, because the other novel that I was trying to write, I just couldn’t get it done. And so I thought, well, let me at least start pouring what’s happening to me now into a book. It turned into that novel and that character, and it was great. I actually think it’s one of my better novels, because it’s so raw and because I was honest about it. I was in the thick of it. It’s not just about me or motherhood. It’s also about my mother and my grandmother and generations of Black women, mothers in particular, and the demands and expectations and all that kind of stuff. Once I started thinking about it, I thought, this is very rich material. Let me pour everything into it. And I was able to get it done; I don’t remember much. It’s both: you remember it impeccably, and a lot of it’s a blur. I couldn’t tell you much about the writing of that novel, other than I was able to get it done, because I know because it exists.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, the proof is there. You talked a little bit about the expectations you had for yourself as a mother and how that can make you feel depleted. Sometimes when you feel weighed down by the expectations—either the expectations that you set for yourself or society sets for you. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What was the standard you were holding yourself to?

Kim McLarin

My mother’s life and my life were very different. My mother raised five children by herself after my parents’ divorce, and my father was not as financially supportive as he should have been. We were very poor. Very poor. And that was a struggle for her. She did a tremendous job, given what she had, but there were deficits in terms of love, or at least outward expressions of love, and engagement and all the stuff that we would consider good motherhood. I’m speaking very carefully here, because it’s not about blaming her or judging her. She did the best she could with the tools she had, and she did a tremendous job. She got us all safely to adulthood, which was her goal and her accomplishment. For a Black woman raising five children in the South at that time period, that’s a hell of an accomplishment. We’re all actually productive, contributing members of society. There’s a nurse and the other’s the head of public health … we’re pretty accomplished. So, she did a good job. 

I felt both the obligation to do that good job but, at the same time, to try to make up for the deficits that I felt as a child. At the same time, my ex-husband is white, and I’m living in a little white suburb and operating in a white world, so the standards that I am surrounded by are different standards. I don’t want to get into too much, but that kind of “go to every soccer practice” and “stand on the sidelines and cheer”—not just the games but every practice. That kind of standard, which was not the standard, just generationally, that my mother had. My mother never went to any kind of art events. You didn’t go to your child’s sports game. It was just ridiculous. 

It was a ridiculous kind of thing, but everybody around me was doing it. And, and I was not. It’s not my natural temperament. I remember once actually driving my kids to a soccer game practice, taking them to the field, then coming back to get in the minivan to do some work in the minivan. And somebody said something to me about it. I was actually there, but I was not standing on the sidelines. So those kinds of middle-class white standards. So: we had the standards of my mother, the middle-class white standards, and my own fear that I wouldn’t be as loving and as present because of my own upbringing. There was just a hodgepodge of demands and expectations from sources internal and external. Finally, at some point, I realized it was ridiculous. My only job was to be the best mother I could be, and that’s all I could do. The rest would just follow, and it did. I think they turned out okay.

Lara Ehrlich

You’re already veering into what I wanted to ask you about next, which is now with a little distance from those soccer games and your kids being small, I’m sure your expectations for yourself have changed with time. Looking back, though, at those earlier days, how do you perceive what kind of mother you were?

Kim McLarin

I was the best mother I could be at the time. That’s the answer. In many ways, I was a damn good mother. I tell my kids, “I have the videotape to prove it.” Last year for their birthdays, I took all the old VHS, because I was afraid they would disintegrate, and put them on CDs and digital. I was watching through them, and there’s birthday parties and random dancing in the living room to REM on a Sunday night, and there’s just walking down the street. I was actually far more present and engaged than I remember myself being. I was far more giving of myself than I remember myself being. 

If you had asked me that question five years ago, I probably would have said I wasn’t as good a mother as I should have been. I would have been much harder on myself. Now, in retrospect, I know not only was I the best mother I could have been, I was actually a pretty damn good mother. I did everything. I baked cookies, I hid Easter eggs, I sprinkled oatmeal on the snow, so that Santa’s reindeer could eat it. 

And more importantly, I tried to teach them about who they were. I tried to teach them about the reality of growing up Black in this society. I tried to make them understand, to teach them to be proud of their history. I tried to teach them to care about other people and to not aspire to those American middle-class white values that can often be so destructive. I can tell from the young people that they are today that I did a pretty damn good job. They’re pretty awesome young people. I think they will contribute to the world in important ways. That’s the job. I don’t care what they accomplish, although they’re on their way to accomplishing a lot, but who they are as people—they’re good people, so I think I did a good job.

Lara Ehrlich

It sounds like you did. We have a question here from Kennedy Esmiller, but I think that you just answered it. She said she’s interested in what you said about your mother accomplishing her goal as a mother. What are some of your goals as the mother? I think you just you just articulated them, but is there anything else you would add to that?

Kim McLarin 

Yeah, my main goal, in retrospect, was to raise good human beings. It wasn’t to raise rock stars or entrepreneurs or people who would get into Harvard, although, I have to say, my son is at Harvard. But it wasn’t to raise accomplished people; it was to raise good human beings, caring human beings, because there are so many uncaring human beings out there. To raise thoughtful human beings, that’s the job. Human beings who can stand on their own and make their decisions. 

That’s the other thing I did. Which again, five years ago, I might have been uncertain about. I really wanted to teach my children to take agency and to take initiative and to learn to navigate the world. Those were my goals as a mother. And, quite honestly, my other goal was to not lose myself in the process, because that’s what my mother did, to some extent, and it cost her, and it’s too bad, because she could have done so much with her life as a woman.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I hear that from so many people. In part, that’s why I started this series, because that was my biggest fear in becoming a mother—the idea of losing myself. And part of that, for me was writing, because that’s how I attach value to myself, in many ways. Is that same for you? Was writing a big part of what you were trying to hold onto as you navigated motherhood?

Kim McLarin

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I knew I was a writer long before I had any interest in having children. I wasn’t sure until the last minute whether I was going to have children, but a writer was who I was from the time since I was 6, really. I knew really early that I wanted to write. If you ask me to identify who I am, writer would be up there—quite honestly, far earlier than mother. I think about myself as a writer who has children. Even when my kids were young, I rarely defined myself as a mother, and I certainly didn’t define myself as a mom. I sacrificed a lot. I did a lot to become a writer, to be a writer. I worked hard to be a writer. And so to have that just kind of go away because I had children would have been really hard.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I completely get that. Were there times when your children were young, or even as they were growing up, that you felt as though you were losing Kim?

Kim McLarin

Oh, sure, yes. I think especially in retrospect. It seems overwhelming and endless, that time, and then, as everybody says, in retrospective, it goes fast. Certainly, when my children were young, especially before they went to school, those years especially. You don’t have time to, like I said before, sit in a study for four hours and write. If you’re lucky, one gets a nap, the other one’s up. When they were older and went to school, it got easier. But still, there were times, because they still took priority, and they should, when I was not as productive. 

I used to tell people that I wrote my first novel, Taming It Down, before I had children. When I first started writing, I would write 1,000 words a day. Because I was a journalist, I was used to writing on deadline. I said, I’m going to write this novel by setting myself a deadline. I looked up how long the average novel is—it’s 50,000 words—I said, fine. If I write 1,000 words a day, 50 days, I’ll have enough. And I had taken a year leave from New York Times to do this. So, I had a deadline. If I didn’t write this novel, I was gonna have to go back to the New York Times, which I didn’t want to do, because I was miserable there. I had to write the first draft in three months. I would sit down every morning, and I would not let myself get up until I’d written 1,000 words a day. And I did that. I did the first draft in like two months. Then I revised it and all that kind of stuff. 

Then, the second novel, I had my daughter, and it took me about two years. The third novel, I had my daughter and my son, and it probably took me three or four years. So, you could see how this was going, right? If I keep having kids, I’m never gonna write again. There was a real cost. That doesn’t mean that it was a bad thing, but there was a cost to my productivity to having children. 

I like to look at things as they are, and maybe that’s not true for all writers. Toni Morrison would get up in the morning and write these amazing novels, parent her two kids, then go to work full-time as an editor and come home. She was a superhuman, right? But for me, there was a cost, and that’s okay.

Lara Ehrlich

I’m interested in the distinction between productivity and … I don’t want to say quality, but the content, because there’s a difference, right? You used the word enrichment. Are you writing more enriched, even though the productivity has lowered?

Kim McLarin

Probably, yes. I think a writer’s job is to explore what it means to be human, so the more experiences that I have about what it means to be human in all kinds of ways, manners, and capacities, then yes, my writing is inevitably going to enrich. In that regard, absolutely, motherhood enriched my writing. It taught me a lot about what it means to be human, about love, about self-sacrifice, about curiosity about how human beings come into the world. And about how little control we have. We’d like to think we can shape our children—and we can, to some extent, and then you can’t. It taught me forgiveness for my own mother. It taught me understanding of my own mother and her life. It enriched me as a human being, and therefore it absolutely enriched my work, without question. Yeah, I think that’s true.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that’s good to hear. I think a lot about the capitalist idea of productivity and the white supremacist culture that enforces the idea that you need to be productive to be a successful person, when maybe you write one book in five years, and it’s a better book than you would have written if you’d have written three books in five years. I’m trying to reconcile that for myself, as well.

Kim McLarin

I think that’s a really excellent point. It is a trap, a capitalist trap, that you are only as good as your latest product and what you’re producing. I remember my editor used to say you’re supposed to be producing a novel every two years, and you should do that so you don’t lose your readership. They induced this kind of anxiety, and that’s unfortunate, and it is counterproductive. At the same time, it is also true. The American public has a very short attention span. Both things are true. Productivity, in the sense of this capitalist demand that your value is wrapped up in what you’re producing, is not good or healthy, and it’s wrong. I also do believe that, like athletes and scientists, anybody who is immersed in their field, you have years when you’re going to be at the peak of your abilities. For me, what I meant by productivity is that it would be good to produce the best things I can while I’m at the peak of my productivity. The good thing about writing is you can keep writing. I’m 56, 57? Sometimes I forget. I’m already starting to see that I don’t feel as compelled about writing. I don’t feel as compelled to write as I used to. I’m trying to figure out what that means.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s really interesting. What did it feel like before? What did the compulsion feel like?

Kim McLarin 

I felt like I had to write or die. I really felt that in my youth, in my 20s and 30s. Writing was a lot of things, but one thing it always was, was “listen to me,” as Joan Didion said. It’s a way of imposing yourself. And it was a way of making a world that was hostile and wanted to render me either invisible or dead or both acknowledge me and deal with me. It felt necessary, just like breathing was necessary, and it doesn’t feel that way anymore. 

I think that’s probably coming with age and less belief that it makes a difference in changing the society. I think I used to believe you can change America. I don’t know that I believe that anymore. I’m sorry to say that, but I think it’s true. Like I said, I’m currently figuring this out, and I’m writing an essay about it, about why I might not want to write anymore. I might retire from writing. I’ll write an essay about it and see what I think about it.

Lara Ehrlich

Still writing to figure out about your will to write.

Kim McLarin

Yeah. In as Didion said, “I write to understand what it is I’m thinking”—that was the other reason writing was so necessary for me, because it’s in the process of writing that I understood what I thought and what I felt and what I believed. Now I think I know more about those things, without having to write.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It actually leads into a question here from Lucette. She says, “Have you ever lost desire to write? If so, how did you manage? If not, how did you maintain the will and desire to continue writing?” It sounds like you’re grappling with that right now. But were there other times?

Kim McLarin

Earlier when my kids were young, did I lose the desire? No, I don’t remember losing the desire back then. I remember losing the energy and the time. But I always had a million things I wanted to write. I teach writing, and I tell my students who ask about writer’s block, “I don’t personally believe in writer’s block.” I believe if it’s not coming, it just means you don’t know enough. It depends on what you’re writing. If it’s your novel, maybe you don’t know enough about your characters. Maybe you don’t know enough about the questions that they’re asking. Maybe you don’t know enough about the world in which they’re building. If it’s an essay, maybe you don’t know enough about what you’re trying to investigate. 

When I feel stuck—I will say stuck, not blocked—I go for a walk or hike or go out and garden or do something physical, and almost inevitably, 90 percent of the time, it works. All of which is to say, I don’t really believe in writer’s block. It’s just a part of the process. There were times when I was stuck or couldn’t figure it out, but that didn’t mean I didn’t desire to write. 

This is actually the first time in my life that I’ve lost the desire to write. That’s why I’m talking about it. Because it’s surprising. It’s like, what is this? The good thing about being a writer is that you can be curious about what’s going on instead of frightened by it. I’m curious about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. I’m gonna write about it and see if I can figure out what it is. It may be that I’ve said everything I had to say. It may be as simple as that, and that would be okay. If I’ve said everything I had to say, then I’ll go open a bakery or something. I can do other things. I mean, I actually do other things, like baking. I like sewing. It’ll be okay.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit more about changing the world. I’m wondering when the waning of interest in writing happened. Did it coincide with this last year that you and I were talking about before the interview started—all of the things that we’re dealing with right now? Do you think that has anything to do with it? Or is that separate?

Kim McLarin

That’s a good question. I think that definitely is part of it. My writing has always been political. I referenced Joan Didion before referencing the George Orwell essay “Why I Write,” and Orwell says, putting aside the need to make money, put that way aside, people write for four or five reasons. One of them is aesthetic pleasure—some people just like words and language. I forget the other ones, but one of them, he says, is trying to show either the way you think the world ought to be or trying to show people the way it really is. Political in that sense. And that has always been me. 

There are other reasons, too, but that’s the primary impulse for me. I’m saying stuff that I don’t understand why everybody else is not saying it, and why don’t you guys see this, and then fix it? As I’ve grown older, and I’ve seen cycle after cycle in this society of racial oppression and police brutality and white backlash—quite frankly, what it is, is Black progress, white backlash, Black progress, white backlash. After you see a couple of those cycles, you start to understand, okay, this is America, this is the cycle. And all the pleading and all that. Far, far, far better writers than me, James Baldwin told us all of this, pleaded with us, pleaded with America, you know, blah, blah, blah. And here we still are, 20, 30 years after his death. I guess it would take an act of faith greater than I have to believe that things will change. I guess maybe I still hope they’ll change. I always wrote with the belief that what I wrote mattered. And as I’m saying this, I know people are going to be like, I do still believe it matters. But I guess I also hoped it would change things, as I said, and I don’t believe it has changed anything, so then the question arises: why keep writing? I could be planting a garden or baking some bread and feeding people or something. I’m honestly grappling with this right now, so what I’m saying to you is all very raw and very uninformed. But it’s the truth.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. How would you as Kim change, if you stopped writing? Earlier, you said that part of what makes up your identity is that you’re a writer. What does that mean to you?

Kim McLarin

Yeah, well, the good news is that my sense of self and identity has shifted. When I was 20 or 30 or even 40, that was a huge part of my identity. It still is part of my identity that will always be intact, even if I never write another word. I got a shelf full of books and a bunch of essays in magazines. But it becomes less vital. My identity as a wife, as a mother, as a friend, as a person in community and in connection with other people—relationships become more important as I get older, understanding that our time on this Earth is limited. I’m already going to leave behind these books. They’re either gonna go the way that most books go, which is into obscurity or, hopefully, those that remain. And as James Baldwin said, when it all comes to ruin, and the young people are digging in the rubble, looking for something to begin again, they’ll find my work and use it to begin again. That’s what Baldwin said he’d hoped for his work. That’s my hope for my work, that when it all comes to ruin, and I think it will, people digging in the rubble will find it and use it to begin again. To answer your question, my sense of myself would not, at this point, change because I’m just Kim. Kim is fully baked, at this point, right? It wouldn’t change in the way it would have 20 years ago.

Lara Ehrlich

I think you do need to open a bakery.

Kim McLarin

I got really, really good at baking bread and cakes, and I love it. Because it’s good for me as a writer, too. It’s different, right? It’s tactile. It’s concrete. You begin and you end, unlike writing, which is endless. And it’s nurturing. You can feed people, and people love it, and they respond. In some ways, it’s a perfect complement to writing because writing can be so open-ended, especially when you’re writing a novel or book. It just takes forever. You can work all day, and people say, “What did you do?” And you’re like, “Well, I wrote.” And they’re like, “What do you got to show for it?” If I bake all day, I got something to show for it. You can see it. So, yeah, I’ve really gotten into baking. I really love it.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I love that. Have your kids read your books?

Kim McLarin

I don’t know, because they don’t talk about it with me. I can guess that my son probably has not. I think he just thinks it’s too weird. My daughter, I think, has read some of my books, but I think it’s hard for them. I have given them all books, I’ve signed them, but they’re very young adults, new adults, and they’re still figuring out who they are and where they stand, and my guess is that they will read it later, when there’s some distance. They have to make that transition from seeing me as their mother to seeing me as Kim, as a writer, as a person who has a whole life. I think they’re just making that transition now. My books deal with grown-up stuff—sex and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think they really want to know.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. How has your relationship with your kids changed as they’ve started to see you as a whole person, separate from Mother?

Kim McLarin

I think it’s a transition. I think when they were younger, they might have wanted a more traditional mother. They might have wanted a mother who revolved her sense of self around them more completely. I was very adamant about not doing that. Once they were in school, I kept working, I was writing and teaching and public speaking. When they were younger, they might have wanted a mother who was more like Ozzie and Harriet or whatever the contemporary reference would be. I don’t watch TV that much anymore. I think now, as they are turning into young adults, we can talk, we have great conversations about the issues that I’m passionate about, the stuff I have been writing about, racial justice, Black liberation. We can talk about those things as adults. I think they often come to me with questions about them, because they know I know this stuff. I’ve invested time and energy into it. I think it’s pretty good.

Lara Ehrlich

Have those conversations changed your perspective on the issues that you’ve been writing about for so long?

Kim McLarin

That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t know that those conversations in particular have, because I also teach young people, I teach people who are my kids’ age, so I’m in conversation with young people all the time, so those conversations, collectively, have exposed me to things that I was not aware of and opened my eyes about things and expanded my understanding, simply because this generation is dealing with stuff that is different, and I am aware of that. I do take that into consideration, and that does expand my consciousness, which I think is good.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Can you give me an example of one thing in particular that they’re dealing with that is different from your generation? And how it’s caused you to think about that issue?

Kim McLarin

In terms of racial issues in general, and I see this with my kids and students I teach, I think students of color and, in particular, Black students of this generation came of age with an expectation of equality and justice that I didn’t come of age with. I think that actually makes it harder for them. I think that’s why there was so much shock and outrage at George Floyd. I mean, there should have been shock and outrage anyway, but I see in young Black people not only anger and frustration but a woundedness that I think, quite honestly, did not exist in people of my age, because we didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect to be loved, quite honestly, by America. I didn’t go into white spaces, when I’ve lived and worked white spaces all my life: Duke University, Phillips Exeter, New York Times. Every place I’ve ever worked is a white space, but I never entered those spaces expecting to be welcomed and loved. People of my children’s age and my students often do enter those spaces expecting to be welcomed and loved, and when they’re not, it is devastating in a way that it wasn’t personally devastating for me. Does that make sense?

Lara Ehrlich

Yes.

Kim McLarin

So, I didn’t realize that. My students would say that they were really hurt and they’d cry and be crushed by some racist comment by some professor or some racist statement or some microaggression, and I would say, yeah, that’s outrageous, it’s messed up, but why are you hurt? I can understand outrage, but hurt? And they explained it to me and then then I understood. 

It has broadened my consciousness, because their experience is different from my experience, and I have to honor their experience. I feel very sorry for their experience, because it’s, in some ways, worse. My mother taught me don’t expect to be loved. You’re going there to get your degree, your computer, you’re going there for business, and then you come home to be loved. Don’t expect to be loved there. In some ways, I think we were protected in a way that this generation was not.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit about James Baldwin’s Another Country and your most recent book.

Kim McLarin

There’s a really wonderful small press called Ig Publishing out of New York. They published my collection Womanish, and they have a series called Bookmarked, which is about the way in which writers write about a book which left a mark. So: Bookmarked. Very cute. They asked me to write about a novel that meant a lot to me, and I picked Another Country, because it’s my favorite James Baldwin novel. I’d read it many, many years ago, so it was an interesting experience to go back and read it again and read it critically. This ties into what we’re saying about change and growth. When I read it the first time, I read it as a reader and loved it. This time, I read it as a writer and as a literary critic, so the book is an exploration of that. It weaves in some personal memoirs, history, and connection along the themes that are explored in that book, which are masculinity and Black womanhood, sexuality, sex and race relations, and the possibility of connection between all of those things. It is my first book of literary criticism. I don’t have a PhD in literature, although I do teach, so it was a really wonderful opportunity to exercise those different muscles, which is different than writing novels and even writing an essay. Writing fiction, writing nonfiction, and writing criticism—these are different. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I think it was really interesting.

Lara Ehrlich  

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of writing that that you do and have done. I’m just looking at the list here in your bio. You’ve got novels, you have memoirs, you have critical and personal examination, the James Baldwin novel, you’re a journalist, and you ghost wrote a book with the daughter of Malcolm X. Tell me a little bit about all those different types of writing. Where did you start? What was your entry point into writing?

Kim McLarin

I’ve also written a one-woman play. I just wrote that, actually. I turned my, my memoir, Divorce Dog, into a one-woman play that’s in development right now. Hopefully, it will be coming to the stage. Possibly in Connecticut. I’ll let you know. 

Until middle age, I considered myself a novelist, first and foremost. Fiction was my first love, and that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I wanted to be, and that’s what I wanted to write, and that’s the first thing I published. I published a couple of short stories. Early on, I never considered myself a short story writer. I do think they’re different muscles—sprinters versus marathoners. Some people can do both, but most people are going to be better at one or the other, and I was never good at sprinting short stories. I’ve never really gotten the short story thing, although I would love to, and I may do that now because it’s easier to write them. But I consider myself a novelist. 

Then I wrote essays. I turned to nonfiction, really out of self-preservation, quite frankly. I needed a book for tenure. That’s the truth. I needed to produce a tenure book, and they wouldn’t consider my three novels because I had already published them before I went on the tenure track, so it was easier to write these essays. I had published a couple of these little essays, but someone asked me to put together a collection. I just discovered that I actually like nonfiction. I had avoided it for a long time, because I didn’t want anybody to think I was writing about myself, and I didn’t want people to focus on whether it was real or not. I wanted people to focus on truth. 

I think in fiction, you can tell a truth that is bigger than what’s real. I tried to make that distinction between reality and truth, and I was more interested in truth, but then I realized that you could tell a truth in nonfiction, too, in a way that even though you appear to be writing about yourself or some subject, you’re really writing about something bigger and more universal. I actually really like writing essays now. There is focus. There are little ways to hit a subject and then get out of it. 

Then I wrote that play, which is fun. I don’t think I’ll write any other plays. Playwriting is a whole different monster. I don’t think I would do that. And the ghost writing is just co-writing. The book with Ilyasah Shabazz was actually co-writing, because my name is on that book. I’ve done ghost written books, where my name is not on it, and I can’t tell you who they are. The one was real Ilyasah Shabazz was because she was Malcolm X’s daughter, and I adore Malcolm X, so I wanted to help out. The other ones have been either for the experience or, quite frankly, the paycheck. It’s a great way to make a paycheck. I think more writers should get involved in it. It’s interesting. You learn that celebrities are very self-involved, more so than writers.

Lara Ehrlich

Just generally with ghost writing and co-writing, do you meet in person? What’s the process of doing that? Does it depend on the person?

Kim McLarin

It depends on the person. With Ilyasah Shabazz, we absolutely met in person. Other people I’ve met in person. You spend a lot of time with them. Now you can do it via Zoom. The last one I did, we did it via Zoom. The important thing is to spend a lot of time with that person, because you’re not only getting down to the story but the rhythm of their voice and their mannerisms and the way they think. So, yeah, you just spend hours every week. That’s the most important thing, to meet weekly, if not daily, depending on what your deadline is, in order to get their voice. It’s actually good practice for a writer because you really have to put yourself aside, and that’s useful when you’re writing a novel, because you really should be doing that with your characters, too. It’s actually very good training for a writer, in addition to being a nice paycheck. It’s interesting to get out of your own head and really try to understand this person’s journey and the most compelling way to tell it.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Are there difficulties with putting yourself aside in some ways? I imagine, if I were listening to someone tell me their story, as much as I’d be trying to capture their voice and their way of narrating, I might, in my head, be writing a novel, their story for myself. Is there some of that going on, too?

Kim McLarin

At first, it is, but I think you quickly learn after two or three, and I’ve done more than that. Here’s where the journalism background was helpful, too. I had a background in journalism, which kind of is the same thing. It’s not about you. And it’s certainly not about the story you would tell. It’s about telling the story before you and the best way that the story wants to be told and, in this case, the best way that the person wants to tell it. There was some of that at the beginning. This is why I say I think I’m done with this, even though, again, it’s a very nice living: the challenging thing is when the person is not as thoughtful as you might hope they would be. You would ask them a question about something, and you really want them to grapple with the question, and they don’t want to grapple with a question, or they don’t understand the question. One of the people I worked with, is a very prominent political person, not from this country, who achieved a great deal and who had to leave her children— literally leave her children—behind. I asked her if she had any regrets about that, and she said, “No.” And that was the end of the conversation. I believed her, too. That’s the worst. Like, how do you write that? 

For me, writing is about being honest. In my essays about motherhood, I put down all my honest, conflicting feelings about motherhood. If I’m not going to tell the truth, what’s the point in doing this? So, when I’m working with somebody, and they’re like that, that’s frustrating. You’re like, wow.

Lara Ehrlich

It’s a short chapter, right?

Kim McLarin

Yeah, right? Next chapter.

Lara Ehrlich

Since we’re coming up on an hour, let’s end with if you could give a message to writer mothers who are listening, in whatever stage they’re in, what message would you give them?

Kim McLarin

Wow. I’m not good about giving advice or messages. I do appreciate that you said “message.” The first thing that came to mind was that campaign for young gay people, “It gets better.” For those who are in the thick of it, because when you’re in the thick of it, it can seem overwhelming, and I do think it’s important to say, “This too shall pass.” The reason people say that is because it’s true, but it also allows you to relax and enjoy where you are—and it is a joy, it is a gift, it’s a privilege to raise these young people, and if you can really understand that, it really will get better. 

I would also say always save a part of yourself. I think that’s important. It’s important for your kids, too. I’m glad that I did this, for our daughters to see us not totally negate ourselves in the service of motherhood. I think that’s a gift to you, and it’s a gift to your daughter and to your son. Save some for yourself.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Kim. This has been such a pleasure. And I love that final message. It’s been just great talking with you.

Kim McLarin

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.