Writer Mother Monster: Sadie Hoagland, “I write dark things. Once I had children, I became more careful; if I’m gonna engage with darkness, I’d better do it for a good reason and with a sense of responsibility.”

(April 29, 2021) Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children and American Grief in Four Stages and has two children, ages 6 and 2. She describes writer motherhood as “exhausting, hilarious, real.” In this episode, Sadie talks about multigenerational motherhood, why ambivalence is underrated, her changing relationship with darkness, and the language of trauma. And, she reads an excerpt of her book–from a ghost’s perspective.

Writer Mother Monster is an interactive conversation 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: Sadie Hoagland

April 29, 2021

Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children and American Grief in Four Stages, which earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Mid-American Review, Five Points, Writer’s Digest, Women Writers, Women’s Books, and elsewhere, and her work has earned four Pushcart Prize nominations. 

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Sadie Hoagland. Thank you all for tuning in. Please remember to chat with us during the interview, so we can weave in your comments and questions. And if you enjoy the episode, please also become a patron or patroness to help keep this podcast going. I’m excited to introduce Sadie. 

Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children and American Grief in Four Stages, which earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Mid-American Review, Five Points, Writer’s Digest, Women Writers, Women’s Books, and elsewhere, and her work has earned four Pushcart Prize nominations. She has two children, ages 6 and 2, and she describes writer motherhood as “exhausting, hilarious, real.” Please join me in welcoming Sadie. Hi, Sadie. It’s great to have you.

Sadie Hoagland  

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. I even did the back of my hair.

Lara Ehrlich

I have not done the back of my hair in probably a full year, and the front is barely okay. You look great. Thanks so much for joining me. Let’s start by telling me a little bit about your three words that describe writer motherhood. You said, “exhausting, hilarious, real.”

Sadie Hoagland

I think all of the writer mothers in the audience certainly can relate to the first one. Especially if your children are still young, you’re just never guaranteed a night’s sleep, never guaranteed eight hours. It’s just exhausting in terms of the kind of relentlessness of responsibility as well. My 2-year-old still needs constant supervision. We’re still in that stage of all-hands-on-deck at all times. And breathlessness, I would say, in terms of exhausting, but it’s also hilarious. Even the exhausting moments are hilarious. Last night, my 6-year-old came in and just stood in our room for a minute and then said, “My leg hurts,” and went back to bed. Which is pretty funny. Like, when you take a minute from just being like, “Oh, why did I get woken up?” You kind of take a step back to be like, did that occur to her to come in? Obviously, she was fine. She went right back to sleep. It was just one of those moments of the things they do and say that give you a glimpse of an entirely different psychic world. We keep a book—I’m sure you do, too—of all the hilarious things that your child has said. It’s definitely hilarious. 

And it’s definitely real, in a couple different ways. One is that I feel like the responsibility is so real, and you don’t get that before you have children. It’s too abstract. I think even though you sort of understand you’re going to be responsible for these children, when you actually have them, it feels like such an intense responsibility, not just in terms of their care and their physical needs but also their social and emotional needs. It’s the idea that I’m the person that teaches you this, I am the person that’s responsible for ensuring that you are growing in the way that’s going to make you into a good person. As much as I love being a writer and working with my imagination, and children are very imaginative, there is also a really grounding sense of the reality of caretaking.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, absolutely. I remember reading somebody’s tweet that said it’s kind of like you see your kid acting in a certain way, and you think, Oh, where’s that kid’s mother? Oh, it’s me. Like, I’m the one responsible for reprimanding or teaching. Tell me, did having your first child prepare you for having your second, or were they completely different experiences?

Sadie Hoagland

There’s a lot of similarities. They’re both really high-energy kids, and their go-to mode is just sort of happy, which is really nice. But they are different personalities. Our daughter is the oldest, and she’s pretty fiery. She has been since she was a baby—very alert, very aware, very ready to speak up at any moment. Our son is definitely more laid back. I don’t know if that’s because we were more laid back with the second child. But I do think some of it is personality with him, because even since he was born, he’s so much more mellow. He kind of just believes us when we’re like, “Everything’s gonna be fine. Go to sleep.” At the same time, he seems like a little less independent than our daughter. But we’ll see. It might just be his age.

Lara Ehrlich

Did you always want to be a mother?

Sadie Hoagland

I guess, yeah. I definitely did have “oh, that’s what we do” growing up. I think when I decided to be a writer, in my early to mid-20s, I thought that might be incongruent. I wanted to explore my independence. I did a lot of traveling. Before I met my husband, I wasn’t sure that that would really fit into my life. I was very happy. I think a lot of young women are at that age to just kind of see where everything was going. But then once we got married, we both start really thinking, yeah, that would be really fun. We definitely got in a lot of backpacking trips and traveling beforehand. We definitely didn’t rush right into parenthood, which I think now I’m really grateful for. We had that time together before we had children. And by that time, I felt a little bit more confident that I could balance the identity of being a writer with the identity of being a mother.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, my husband and I were married for about six years before we had kids, for that reason. Also, because we wanted to spend the time together. I wasn’t sure whether writing and motherhood could coexist, like you said. It’s definitely, I think, a question that a lot of the guests on the show have struggled with, in the decision to have children, whether they would lose the writer part of themselves. Tell me a little bit about that decision to become a writer in your mid-20s.

Sadie Hoagland

In college, I majored in psychology, but I’d been taking all the creative writing classes. I think there’s a lot of barriers to becoming a creative writer, and one of them is that people tell you, “That’s not a good career, to make any money doing that.” So, I just sort of thought, well, okay, I’ll be a psychologist, and I’ll get to work with people, and that will be fun. But towards the end of my college career, when I was looking at clearer paths, I really just kept coming back to no—I want to write. I want to try it out. If I fail, I can always go back to psychology. I left college and started doing internships for magazines and some freelance journalism writing. It took about three years before I finally decided to go to graduate school and get serious about this and take the time to really pursue it.

Lara Ehrlich

What was it about writing that drew you in?

Sadie Hoagland

I always wrote, even as a child, and it’s really fun to watch my 6-year-old now. She’s the voracious reader, and she’s starting to write her own stories. And I’m like, obviously, trying not to get overly excited and freak her out. I loved reading as a kid, and I think that when a kid loves reading, they just want to try that on. I wrote this novel when I was maybe 8. It was on, like, stationery paper that had monkeys on it. It had, you know, Chapter One: The Neighborhood Dog Goes Missing. I think it was a five-chapter novel. I felt really excited. I had a family friend who was a small-town newspaper writer, and she was very encouraging, like, “Keep doing it, just keep doing it.” 

Then I started writing plays for my friends, and, much to their dismay, we would act them out. A lot of them were sort of fairy tales gone wrong—like, the fairy tale starts out how it normally starts out, and then Rapunzel just gets fed up and scales down the tower. We were really into those. I just kind of always wrote. I got some encouragement in high school and then definitely in college from creative writing teachers who would say, “You have some talent,” which is always really reassuring to hear when you’re younger.

Lara Ehrlich

What led you to writing a book, to go from journalism to a novel?

Sadie Hoagland

I did the magazine writing for a few years, and a couple of longer-form journalism pieces, but I had been writing essays and nonfiction and fiction during that time. When I applied to graduate school, one of the things those programs do is encourage you to do a book-length manuscript with the format of the program, your thesis, and dissertation and things like that. 

So, once I got there, it was clear that they wanted a book-length project at the end. And by that time, I was writing fiction, so I ended up writing a novel, that I never did anything with, for my thesis for my master’s. But the whole time, I was also working on the short stories that became American Grief in Four Stages. And not long after finishing that, I started the novel Strange Children. Actually, maybe it was right before I finished. I started thinking I was writing a couple stories, which became the first couple of chapters.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me about the novel that you didn’t end up doing anything with. I think we all have a project like that. What did it teach you about writing?

Sadie Hoagland

I had just read W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which is a very hypnotic novel; the language and the rhythms of his writing kind of draw you in. And honestly, I think any reader that’s read that book and picks up this novel will be like, “Oh, look, she just read Austerlitz.” It definitely has the same kind of rhythms. I kind of used the momentum of reading that to start, and I wrote it relatively quickly. It was under 200 pages. It was actually about motherhood, as well. It was, interestingly enough, about unhappiness in motherhood, which I think is one of the things that I was grappling with at the time. 

This was before I was married, and I was in that space of “how do these equate?”—motherhood and writing. It follows three generations of women, and the middle generation, the mother, had struggled a lot with postpartum depression. She has a narrative that’s both the most poetic but the darkest of the two, and then the daughter was a horse veterinarian, which was kind of fun, because I got to do a lot of research on horse veterinary practices. 

The grandmother was very much a “this is how you be a lady” type, very much modeled after my own grandmother. I never got to a point where I understood what that novel needed to come into fruition, but I did recently resurrect those three characters, the mother, the daughter, and the granddaughter, into another novel that I’ve written, and the daughter has changed quite a bit. Well, they’ve all changed quite a bit, but some of the tension that is between them, the generational idea of how you succeed being a woman and the friction of that between the three generations of adult women is definitely still present in this new novel, which is called Circle of Animals, which I just finished a draft of.

Lara Ehrlich

Congratulations.

Sadie Hoagland

Thank you.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me, if this book was centered on motherhood, and you were in your master’s program and not yet married, was it that was sort of percolating there about motherhood? And what were you grappling with at the time before it was even really a possibility for you?

Sadie Hoagland

I think what I felt at that time about motherhood was ambivalence. I think ambivalence is really underrated. The idea that we have many emotions towards something, and some of those emotions are conflicting, and yet we still hold them. I think, at that age, I felt very excited about motherhood and the idea of it but also not sure if it was possible with my writing life. I think before you have children, you’re just not sure that your heart is going to expand in the correct ways. I think that’s a fear. 

I talk to younger women about this, my students that have asked, “What if I have a child and it’s the wrong decision?” They have that kind of fear. I think some of it was grappling with that, so writing a character that expressed the worst possible scenario of emotional wreckage after giving birth, I think that allowed me to think about that in ways that were both artistic but also personal—thinking what’s the worst thing that could happen? And to see how her daughter is fine and her mother is stepping up different ways as well.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me about American Grief in Four Stages.

Sadie Hoagland

American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of short stories that thinks about grief and trauma from the perspective of this really beautiful statement in Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, where she says trauma is a space where language fails us. I was leaning into that idea of, what is language in this space of grief? And why do we only have clichés to express our sympathy to someone who’s just lost someone or experienced something devastating? 

I wanted to write against that, so I started writing stories that had what I have come to call an extreme language posturing. They’ll come out and say the things that we never say, like, one story begins, “We knew my sister was different after all, the day she was murdered”—like a really kind of shocking statement that throws into relief all the things that we don’t usually say surrounding death, when we don’t give details, or we’re abstract, or we just sort of say, “I’m sorry,” and we don’t have ways to think about the narrative of healing and how someone gets to that fifth stage, which is acceptance. 

I think that book is also expressing the idea that there is some grief and trauma that is not going to be accepted in the same way as others.

Lara Ehrlich

Do you mind me asking what kinds of grief and trauma those are, and if they were traumas that you were grappling with as you were writing the stories?

Sadie Hoagland

Sure. There’s suicide, there’s murder, there’s an overdose of a friend. There are much subtler versions of loss, too. I shouldn’t say that, because no one’s gonna want to read it, especially after what a difficult year we’ve all had. But there are moments of lightness, and there are moments that think about loss in much subtler ways. 

There’s a story called “Father Writer,” which is about the moment that you realize you’ve lost the previous version of your child—like, your child is still there, but you’ve lost the little one that they were, and how that continually happens in parenthood. 

There are a few other stories that deal with different moments in history and what loss meant. There’s one about the Salem witch trials. Another, about Aztecs, is definitely supposed to add some comedy. There’s a couple of different emotions that you go through reading it, so it’s not so heavy. 

Several people close to me had experienced loss, including my husband, who lost his father to suicide, and my best friend lost her brother to suicide, and I was really grappling with being the person standing there, totally unable to say anything that would help and also witnessing how difficult particularly suicide is to recover from for survivors, because there isn’t a narrative that makes sense. There isn’t a way in which we can say, “That’s why that happened.” I think if there was a narrative, it was legible to a mind that was sick and not legible to a well mind. I think it’s one of those things where a lot of the ideas we have about grief and moving on and recovery don’t fit as simply.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit about how that book was received. What kinds of feedback and notes did you receive from readers, and what was the launch experience like? 

Sadie Hoagland

One of the things that I didn’t anticipate but was grateful for at that time, is someone would maybe have read the book, maybe have read a chapter or a story, or maybe have just heard me read, and they would open up to me and tell me, “I experienced this, and I haven’t been able to talk about it, and I’m so glad that you’re mentioning how difficult it is.” 

One of the things that I would talk about in my readings is that we don’t really have, in mainstream American culture, any kind of grieving traditions, like many cultures do. Many cultures have traditions where you wear white for a certain amount of days, you follow a certain diet—these rituals that help the grieving person to signal that at this moment, they are existing outside of society, and to help others around them know that as well. We don’t have anything like that, so lot of people expressed a sense of, “Oh, we can talk about this now,” which I really appreciated. 

Of course, it was a pre-pandemic launch, by a few months, so I did get to have an in-person reading, which was wonderful. Right before the pandemic, in February 2020, I got to go to Pittsburgh and do a couple of events, which was really fun. I had some friends in the area that came, and now I’m looking at it like the most nostalgic thing. It was at a little bookstore, and there were hugs, and I was eating in a restaurant. 

This launch is very different, for Strange Children, but I do still feel like I’m able to connect with people. I will miss the kinds of conversations that happen, I think for a lot of writers, in that moment after reading when someone comes up and says something sort of astounding, or is really generous with how much they share in that moment.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I definitely missed having that. You and I have books from the same publisher. Mine came out in September, right during the midst of the pandemic. But what was so nice is having these really interesting conversations like this that we can have in a virtual space that we couldn’t have in person and talking to people like across the country who suddenly can just dial up and not have to travel and get a hotel and all that stuff. I’m excited to see what you do for your virtual tour. Strange Children comes out May 18, right? Could I put you on the spot and ask you if you’d like to read a little bit of it?

Sadie Hoagland

Okay. The plot of the story is that a 16-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl in a polygamous community fall in love. It’s an illicit and forbidden relationship, and they’re caught. The 16-year-old boy is exile from the community, and the girl is married off to his father. A year later, she gives birth to his father’s child, and he commits a crime in the city, which then kind of reverberates back onto the community. The community starts to unravel, both from external pressures, but also from a kind of internal strife going on. 

The story about this community falling apart is actually told by the adolescents of the community. There are eight narrators. There’s one narrator who is an outsider who’s been affected by one of them. She’s a ghost. She gets the prologue and also has a section not too far in, and they’re both quite short, but they both kind of give a top down description of the community, so I thought that would be a nice kind of setting of the story to me

Here’s the prologue:

Listen. Out of the desert silence, the sound of dogs panting, yelping, a distant barking in tempo. They came here that very week after the fire burned the prophet’s house. Smoke curled up, then bloomed above the pink mesas. Ash fell like snow on the red Earth, and the temple and the houses of the faithful, airborne to breed. For days after, even the smoke seemed to sink, to hang about and brown the quiet air, and out of this fog the dogs came. They came with tongues hanging out and dust frosting their fur, they came wagging their tails and striding through the remains like victors. The children took to them right away, sneaking them bits of pig fat and whispering them names like chickpeas and bone. Listen, sometimes things are over before they begin. So, remember this moment, picture it, a burned town, a missing prophet, of people wandering in the desert. And when it is over, I’ll be right back here to the end, listening to the dogs freckling the pale hush that lay over Redfield. But first, the children. Listen. These strange children spoke the beginning and the after, and they burned the ends together deep in the morrow of our hearts. They cleared a place for us, a place to feel for in the dark.

And this is another section that she has, a couple chapters later:

Listen, I’m the ghost of the dead girl. I’ve come to Redfield to watch the end come as the beginning backwards to get forwards to die, to be reborn, to bear witness and then testimony and try my hand at being the one who is first prophecies. The one who asked you if you believe a whole world can disappear. I saw Redfield, half-finished houses and old ranchettes, skinny horses, knobby grass, sagebrush and cliffs that went from red to white like puckered lips as they wrinkled down to the mouth of the town. I saw them all, the children, the women, the sisters, blonde Anna Lou and redheaded Emma, their brother, Levi, who was overripe and you could tell had gone from too sweet to half rotten as he grew. His sister Mary, his mother Elizabeth, his half mother’s shrewd Tressa who had a cadence of skin as white as snow. I saw the changeling boy man tie, I saw him and his mother Beth in her pain, in his pain, in the littlest ones’ pain. I wanted to turn away. I saw the prophet and knew I’d be back for him. First, I needed to talk to her, to Emma, across our worlds like speaking through wool. I tried to tell her what he’d done to me before it was too late, who he really was. I see her tender ear, a cave and the night. I can walk in there past her thick red hair. I can make my body, sound my bones, syllables. Once I am in, I whisper, “Murderer.” I come out in time to watch her start a week to touch her throat, to catch her breath, and shiver in the bleach like them.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Sadie. It was beautiful. I was telling you before the interview that you and I were in an event together where I heard you read and immediately called you and asked you to be on my podcast. It was just so lovely. So thank you. Let’s talk about the practicality of writing a book with two small children.

Sadie Hoagland

Yeah, it is not an easy thing. I see conversations on social media sometimes from other writers who’ve just recently had children and ask another person like me, how do you do this? Like, tell us the secret. I love hearing the different strategies that people come up with to find that time. But I have not found one solution that I’m just super excited to share and bottle and sell to everyone. 

I think when I was in that graduate school space of wondering whether writerhood and motherhood mix, one of the things that had me worried was that very few of my female mentors, who I admired so greatly, had children, but one of them did, and I asked her, is it okay? Do you find time to write? How’s that going? I just wanted to know. She was a prolific writer and successful, and she kind of looked at me and said, “I don’t find time to write; I steal it.” 

I think of that phrase often. I think of stealing time. I don’t have the time, and no one’s going to present the time to me on a platter and say, “Would you like to write for four hours today?” I just find, every week, the little pockets that I can. The past couple of years, I’ve been working a lot under deadlines and revisions and things like that, and that’s been helpful, because when I have an authority outside of me saying, “This is important. Get this done,” I prioritize it in a way that I wish I would prioritize for my own creative, generative work. 

I’m also in academia, so I follow that work schedule. Summers and holidays always seem to present these open spaces of time where I could get more done. Of course, that’s not really true anymore. But there are times when, if I can get childcare, that’s what I can be doing, so that’s really, really helpful. 

But there have been times, like when I was finishing the edits for Strange Children, when, at one point, I just set my alarm. I’m not a morning person, but I just set my alarm for 5 a.m. because my daughter was waking up at around quarter to 7 at that point, before my son was born. I would keep my laptop right by my bed and just kind of move the computer onto my lap and, like, sleep write. Then, I’d fully come awake to try to finish what I had to do. I did that for, I think, three and a half weeks, and it got done. 

Lara Ehrlich

I hear you. We were talking about ambivalence and how your female students are grappling with that ambivalence themselves. What do you tell your female students who come to you and ask how you balance writing and motherhood?

Sadie Hoagland

I think, ultimately, for everyone, obviously, the decision to be a parent is a very personal one. I think the key thing to note for young women thinking about being a writer and a mother is that anyone needs to be incredibly disciplined to be a writer. That’s something that I tell all of my students. You have to have a lot of discipline and a lot of ability to go on, despite very little encouragement. 

I think all of those qualities become maybe even more important if you’re going to balance parenting or even certain kinds of employment that are time-consuming. And especially if you add both of those, that discipline factor will definitely need to be there. I think after you have children, you’re like, “I don’t remember anyone saying how much time and work this is, especially when they’re young.” I think that, of course, they did tell us, and you just can’t hear it. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy hormones or what, but you just cannot hear that. And then when you experience it, you’re like, oh, wow, this is really different. 

For me, it’s absolutely worth it. I love being a mother, and I love hanging out with my children. But at the same time, I have lots of friends that are not parents, and I sort of wonder what they do with all their time. I have this secret fascination. I wonder if they just write on the weekends, and then they just go out? It’s kind of this foreign world to me. So, I think that those qualities that you have to have to be in this business, you have to have even more of them.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that’s actually great. I’m thinking about discipline and persistence. And not only do you not get a lot of encouragement in this business, you get a lot of rejection, the opposite of encouragement. You have to want it pretty badly.

Sadie Hoagland

And one thing about that, before I had children, I let myself dwell on some of those rejections. When you have children, you’re like, that’s just my ego. I gotta move on. I’ve got to, you know, make dinner. Children bring you out of yourself and your artistic tendencies, if you have any.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, let’s stick with that for a second. Tell me how having children has changed you as a writer.

Sadie Hoagland

One of the short stories in American Grief is “Father Writer,” and the gender is switched, but the sentiment … I mean, I write dark things. I think once I had children, I became much more careful about how I engage that darkness. I’m not one of those people that are like, “Oh, that’s incompatible,” like, children are all innocence and bubbles and flowers. I don’t think that at all. There’s this really wonderful Edith Pearlman story called “Honeydew,” where the father’s child gets really sick. It’s told from the perspective of one of the women who’s a caregiver in the house. She finds out that he’s been drawing these pictures of dismembered children and shoving them in a drawer. It’s kind of comparing that to an amulet. Like, he’s kind of letting his mind get into the darkest place possible, so that he can grapple with this fear of losing his child, because he doesn’t know what else to do. And he thinks that somehow maybe that act will serve as some sort of prayer or ritual that would save the child, and the child ends up being fine. That story really spoke to me as a parent. There was a sense in which my writing didn’t change tremendously, but my attitude towards it did. I felt like, oh, if I’m gonna write this, I better write it for a good reason. If I’m going to engage with like darkness or really violent moments, I want to do that with a sense of responsibility, and I know the responsibility to my children. I think the world seems a little bit heavier. Maybe it’s what we talked about earlier, that sense of realness to it all. It suddenly feels very real.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Now, as a fellow dark writer, I hear that. Before my story collection was published, I also had a novel that didn’t go anywhere, and it was very dark, and it was about children. And I don’t think I could write that same book today. Not that there isn’t darkness in childhood, and I think I was responsible in writing it, but there was a sense of abandon that you could write when you don’t have children. And then when you do, darkness has a certain weight to it that it didn’t before. Tell me about some of the fears or anxieties around parenthood or the joys that you put into Strange Children and the next book that you just finished the draft of.

Sadie Hoagland

I had done a lot of Strange Children before I had children, but one scene I did post-children was the childbirth scene, which I’m really glad I didn’t try to write before giving birth. I think I could have done it with research and everything, but I’m assuming it was better because I had had children. 

I think I wrote the next novel with a larger sense of story—not that I wasn’t interested in voice and language with the same passion, but I also was more interested in these large, structural story questions. In Circle of Animals, I feel like there’s a sense of redemption. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s not an unhappy ending, either. 

Some of the ways in which that book is organized both speaks to the fact that one of the things that happens when you become a parent is you get your act together pretty quickly, if it’s not already together, and one of the functions of having so much less time is that when I went into writing that novel, I wanted to have a plan. I wanted to be able to know what I was going to write on Tuesday morning. I can’t just sit and stare at my computer and maybe make some notes for two hours. That’s not going to fly. I need to use those two hours. I didn’t outline the novel chapter by chapter, but I certainly had a better sense of where I was going and wanting to use the time on the page and the time in my personal life in the best, most efficient way possible.

Lara Ehrlich

Did that change the actual writing at all?

Sadie Hoagland

Yeah, I think it did. Strange Children is mostly first person, so when I would sit down to write those, I would almost think of it as I’m inhabiting this character. Where are they in the world? And what are they seeing? What are they hearing? And writing these monologue pieces for these characters. But when I was looking at a book from a bigger-picture standpoint, it was more like when you’re playing with her dollhouse figures, you’re kind of moving them around, and you have to figure out how to make those movements. I think there’s actually a lot more movement in the second book. It’s partly because it’s not in an isolated cult community for 90 percent of it—they’re moving, they’re going, they’re driving through different parts of California, they’re seeing different things, they’re going back and forth to work, and I’m keeping track of them in that larger sense way. I think it must have changed the writing, to that extent, for sure.

Lara Ehrlich

I wonder, too, if it changed the prose. I did something similar, I used to be very exploratory and write by hand in notebooks and take forever to write something. And that’s certainly not a bad way to write. But I found that once I had a child, and that was when I also finished a draft of a novel, writing that was very similar to what you’re describing—like, okay, I have a limited time to work, so I need to figure out what the next chapter will be. And then write the next chapter and then figure out what the next chapter will be. I feel, like you, that lent some additional sense of movement to the book. 

Something I grapple with is whether it makes the prose less or more to the point, more blunt, or crisp, rather than in the exploratory prose. I feel like sometimes you go off on a tangent, you come up with this gorgeous line that you can weave back in somewhere else. But that’s something I’m still trying to parse for myself, whether a more regimented writing schedule means more regimented prose. I don’t know. What have you found?

Sadie Hoagland

I think that’s a really good point. I think it’s absolutely true. I have a friend who’s a writer who says that she always likes a writer’s first novel best, because that’s when they’re kind of learning how to write a novel and making those exploratory moves that aren’t really necessary and that they later learn they didn’t need to do but that are interesting and create a depth to the prose that maybe isn’t necessarily there if you’re going from point A to point B to point C. I have wondered that. 

Obviously, all of our books have special places in our heart, but I definitely feel like Strange Children is the book that taught me how to write a longer piece, probably in the most complicated way possible. I don’t know why I decided to have eight narrators. I could’ve made it a little easier on myself. But at the same time, I was so language focused in it. I really feel very proud of several sections of that book. 

Circle of Animals has an element of mystery, and I was interested in using the tropes of the mystery genre but in productive and fresh ways. But it does think a lot more about the reader, which is maybe a good thing. I’m writing with one eye on the audience in a way that I definitely wasn’t for Strange Children, partly because I think when I was first writing the novel, it took me forever to admit that I was writing a novel, because I think I didn’t want to freak myself out or something. With Circle of Animals, I just said, oh yeah, that’s definitely what I’m doing. Like, absolutely.

Lara Ehrlich

Do you think that has something to do with the confidence that you’ve gained in the fact that you can write a novel? Now it’s okay to say this is going to be a novel?

Sadie Hoagland

Yeah, I think so. I think confidence, experience, all of the ways that you grow and mature as a writer and a person. I’d love to have both the raw sense of aimless prose and the tight storyline. I think when you get writers that can do that—I think Toni Morrison is a writer who can do that—you get pretty extraordinary books.

Lara Ehrlich

We have a question here from Kennedy Esmiller. She says, “I’m curious about the multi-generational characters you mentioned, resurrecting for a new book. What was the experience of stepping into those different mother perspectives, originally and now?”

Sadie Hoagland

That’s a great question. The mother character is the middle generation. The mother that I wrote in graduate school was just a very dark personality. She was also grieving. She had a real difficulty connecting with her baby. And that led her to withdraw into herself. And in the second book, the Circle of Animals, she wants to be a good mother. She would have a hard time connecting, but everything about the identity of mother just bores her. Like she does not like the idea of being making peanut butter sandwiches, she would not be into Pinterest—that’s not her thing. She’s a hippie, she’s very free-spirited, she wants her daughter to grow up and be independent and different. It doesn’t make a lot of effort to do the kinds of things that a good mother would do, like pack a backpack or make lunch—those kinds of things just aren’t important to her. Larger issues are. She is a much more connected mother, but an ongoing theme, or maybe an inside joke between the mother and daughter, is her inability to mother in a traditional way. The grandmother is really similar in both books, and she’s a little bit more peripheral of a character, but she’s a white glove kind of lady, just very traditional in terms of how women should act, and her daughter is a definite rebellion of that.

Lara Ehrlich

You said the grandmother was based on your own grandmother. Tell me about your mother and about you growing up and your grandmother in the multi-generational true-life experience.

Sadie Hoagland

My grandmother died when I was 12, so I think a lot of the ideas I have about her are very childlike ideas, that we have to be really polite. But I think she had a very adventurous personality, from what I hear. I think probably the majority of what I was taking in as a child and witnessing the relationship between my mother and grandmother is that large generational gap between pre-feminism and post-feminism. I think a lot of families have the same kind of issue growing up. My mother is a wonderful mother. She is really inspiring in the sense that she’s so generous. She actually has my child right now as we speak, my youngest, and she’s been doing our daycare all year, because we had him in daycare, and with the pandemic, it just got too complicated, so she stepped in. I’m very lucky. 

I think that her dedication to being a mother is different than the one her own mother had. I would have to ask her more about that. But I get the sense that she’s one who would never miss a birthday, wants everything to be just right, and I don’t think her mother was exactly the same way. I think her mother was more interested in the social appearances type of thing, but I’m not exactly totally sure about that. Did I just absorb that as a child? Or was it really true?

Lara Ehrlich

What kind of expectations did you have for yourself of what type of mother you would be?

Sadie Hoagland

That’s a great question. I think especially in this last year, with the stress of the year, and as my daughter gets older and there’s more potential for conflict—because they can make decisions and not listen to you—I definitely feel like it’s almost easier to say in a moment, this isn’t the mom I want to be. I don’t want to be yelling. I take a step back. I want to be emotionally available. That’s probably the most important to me. And to be able to be present with them, partly because, gosh, it goes so fast, as everyone always says. It really does. It’s so wild being a parent, because you’re like, I have all these interesting things to teach my child, and they’re like, I don’t care. Once in a while, they’ll get interested, but really, my daughter’s world is everything that she finds fascinating, and she is taking that in such different directions that I did as a child. And similar ones, too, like she loves reading. It’s really fascinating to watch. 

Part of my expectations of being a mother have shifted. I’m not necessarily the tour guide anymore. I’m kind of along for the ride, ready to give some feedback or some correction if needed, but really, they don’t need us, I don’t think, in quite the way that we can imagine. I think part of that is the age of my oldest. She’s going from me and her dad are her whole world to “Oh my gosh, have you heard of elementary school? It’s amazing.” She tells us jokes. I’m like, wow, you have this whole life now that has nothing to do with us. We only get the glimpse of it that you choose to share, which is particularly true this year, when we’re not allowed by the school building. We could see some things going on Zoom for half a year, but we weren’t getting the same sense of here’s this community, this social world that you’re part of.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. You mentioned, when we were talking about American Grief, that some of the stories were about the loss of a child in the form that they once were, like the little baby that you’ll never have again, but you still have the same person, so it’s not a real loss, but it feels very viscerally like a real loss. I know what you mean by that, and I’m sure anyone listening will know, and you look back at pictures or videos of this little person, and it’s like you miss them, but they’re sitting right next to you. I think about that a little bit in what you were saying, that the more they grow up, the more they move away from you and have their own lives, the more exciting that is, in some ways, because isn’t that your role as a parent, to usher them along that path, but also kind of devastating? Because they’re moving away from you?

Sadie Hoagland

Yeah, it really is. It’s that mixed bag where you’re just so happy. Particularly with my daughter, she’s so independent, and I’m so proud of that, and I’m so happy for her that she is completely confident, and I’m the one that wants to follow her in the building. I’m the one that’s not quite ready to let go. I stopped myself. I don’t go in the building. I’m not allowed there anyway right now, but I would stop myself, because I want her to feel that competence and independence. And, and but at the same time, I’ve been surprised at how hard it is. It’s so difficult to watch them move away from you, and it’s totally part of life and completely normal. I can’t imagine when she’s 13.

Lara Ehrlich

I’m excited for and dreading when my daughter goes to kindergarten in the fall. I joke, but I’m kind of not kidding when I say that I’m going to follow the bus to school on the first couple of days—make sure she gets off the bus and that she’s not crying because somebody teased her or whatever. If you were to give a message to any writer mothers listening, what message would you offer?

Sadie Hoagland

Hang in there. Just keep going. I’m just so excited about your podcast, because I think we all need to know that there are others like us, and I think younger women need to know that yes, it’s possible to do it, you can have this, you can be a writer and a mother and a monster—all of those things. I think it’s really important for us to know there are other women doing this, that it’s completely possible, and to kind of keep that in mind, especially on those days where it doesn’t seem like you’ll ever write again because you’ve got so many other things to do. The other thing I would say is one of the things I’d like to do when I get time is come up with more resources for women writers and mother writers in particular, because I think there are so few opportunities. There are more than there were 10 years ago, but I think there should be even more.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much, Sadie. And congratulations on the publication of Strange Children and good luck with the virtual tour. I hope you’ll keep us posted.

Sadie Hoagland

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a delightful conversation. And again, thank you for having this podcast and connecting all these other writers.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Sadie, and thank all of you for tuning in.