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But then I started wondering what’s lost when we don’t allow our brain any “off” time. When little in our lives is allowed to be playful and imperfect. Yes, I’ve heard all the mantras about rest and self-care and, in theory, I’m a big believer in those things (though I find them difficult in practice). But what about another activity? One where I’d get to be a beginner? Where there are no stakes? No goalposts? No ideas of what “success” looks like?

And that’s when I stumbled upon an in-person class, Diary of Calm, at Tatter, the amazing textile library and cultural arts organization in Brooklyn. Suddenly, I found myself slipping down rabbit holes about Aitor Saraiba, the instructor, who, by the way, makes his own yarn from the sheep that live on his farm.

Next thing I knew I was sitting in a room full of two dozen people in Tatter’s gorgeous space this past weekend learning about “slow stitching” and listening to Aitor encourage us to create stories through thread, found objects and layers of cloth. Just as I’ve spent my life writing stories about the women in my family, and in turn my own story too, Aitor has been stitching stories about the generations of women in his farming village in Spain. “It’s been 20 years of investigation,” he said. And my heart immediately jumped because that’s something I tell my students all the time: that writing is a quest, an investigation, a way to spelunk deep into your heart and mind.

Aitor encouraged us to think of our cloth as a diary, a place to make mistakes as part of the learning process. A few minutes later, I layered a piece of lace over a gingham square and made my first stitch, then looked around proudly to see if anyone else noticed. No one did. And that’s when it hit me: even here, in a room with no goalposts, no stakes, nothing to master, I was still checking to see if I was being graded. Ten minutes later I saw that the cloth was crooked. I had forgotten to pin it down. My first mistake. One of many I hope.

When I got home that night, I couldn’t stop researching other people who tell stories through textiles. I booked a visit to Jessie Mordine Young’s studio. I signed up for a new class. I bookmarked a “creative third space” so I can drop-in and work on my textile project the next time I have an afternoon free. But the thing that stuck with me happened yesterday, when I dragged Clementine to Brooklyn General Store to buy more thread than I needed. Clementine wandered the aisles picking out buttons like they were candy and pointing out thread she loved. For twenty minutes it felt like we were both six and excitedly getting art project supplies.

I know it’s probably strange to scream from the mountaintops about slowing down as we head into Back to School season with its rah-rah, get-down-to-business mantra. But that’s exactly the point. If the only things worth doing are the ones that produce something, a book, a client, a “beach” body, then a crooked piece of stitching might be the most radical thing I did all week.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the more time we spend asking machines to finish our sentences, the more we crave something that can only be made by hand, slowly, badly, by us.

In Community,

Ruthie

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If you want to get unstuck and back on the page this fall, my 8-week Kickstarter starts Oct 6. Over 8 weeks, we’ll unblock your creative brain and build a writing flow that generates real work. You’ll get in-class writing exercises, optional homework, one-on-one workshopping of long-form pieces, and a curated mystery box of reading and listening recommendations, all designed to help you find a rhythm that lasts well beyond the course.

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All I did in my video was say the quiet part out loud: most women who get pregnant in their mid-40s are using donor eggs. Nobody says that part in the celebrity profiles or the miracle headlines. It teaches younger women their biological clocks will keep ticking into their late 40s and even 50s when they won’t. And it teaches women who used donor eggs that their path is something to keep secret.

I didn’t say anything in that video I haven’t been saying for years. I used donor eggs to have my daughter, and I wrote a whole book about it. What made the video travel, I think, is that so few people are willing to say it publicly.

One woman wrote in the comment section of my reel that the silence around donor eggs feels dishonest to her — that if someone had told her how steeply fertility declines, she might have tried to freeze her eggs while she still could.

Women deserve accurate information. And that information is being withheld when a celebrity profile mentions another superstar is having a baby. Every month there seems to be a listicle of “23 stars who became moms after 40” yet none lay out how. Without the stats that show just how rare it is for a woman to have a baby in her mid-40s with her own eggs, it’s easy to believe that science will be able to give you a baby at any age.

So many women have reached out to me saying they feel duped: they were sold the miracle stories. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. If donor conception were spoken about as one of several ordinary ways people become parents, then saying “most pregnancies after 45 involve donor eggs” wouldn’t expose anyone or carry any shame. It would just be information.

I will not put an asterisk on my motherhood or anyone else’s. And I will not participate in an information blackout that leaves women discovering the real stats in a fertility clinic.

Donor eggs gave me my daughter. I would make the choice again tomorrow, and I’ve never once regretted saying so in public even when it would have been easier not to.

What I regret is how many women are still carrying this alone. So consider this an open door. If you used donor eggs, or considered it, or wish someone had told you it existed as a real path, the comments here are a place to say it out loud, at whatever volume feels comfortable for you.

If this resonates, my memoir The Mother Code is the long version, the whole story of how I got here and the myths I had to unlearn on the way.

xo,

Ruthie

There aren’t many people online having this conversation but Victoria Nino posts great content on normalizing infertility and donor conception. If you want to dig deeper into this topic, she’s a great person to follow!

If you want to get unstuck and back on the page this fall, my 8-week Kickstarter starts Oct 6. Over 8 weeks, we’ll unblock your creative brain and build a writing flow that generates real work. You’ll get in-class writing exercises, optional homework, one-on-one workshopping of long-form pieces, and a curated mystery box of reading and listening recommendations, all designed to help you find a rhythm that lasts well beyond the course.

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I feared if I had two projects going at once I’d lose momentum on both. Or get confused. Or overwhelmed. Then again, I’d heard Susan Choi talk about how her novel Trust Exercise was originally a side piece that became the real thing as it blossomed under her attention and care. She’d won the National Book Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. If Susan Choi did it successfully, who was I to say no?

So when I recently found myself at a crossroads with my nonfiction project, I decided to pick up that novel I’d been secretly scribbling for years. I told myself I wouldn’t fall in love. It wasn’t emotional. It would just be a little bit of fun while I waited for the other book to fall into place.

And then, you guessed it. Once I began writing I couldn’t get enough. My novel was so much more carefree than the heavy lifting of nonfiction. The words just poured out of me. I found myself laughing, feeling like a beginner again in all the best ways. The thing that surprised me wasn’t just that I fell in love with the writing, but that I started understanding things about my nonfiction project that I’d forgotten. The momentum in one book loosened something in the other. The aliveness I felt with my novel turned into aliveness for my writing in general.

What’s the project you’ve been pretending not to want? What’s the rumbling on the page that you’ve been ignoring?

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I’ll tell you how the affair is going as it continues. In the meantime, go call your own side project. It’s been waiting.

xo,

Ruthie

This is my third year teaching at Omega and my tenth year heading there to write. Every year I love my cohorts but this year I couldn’t have asked for a better group (am I allowed to pick favorites?!). Eleven of us spent five nights and six days mapping our transformation from life to the page and back again. And since there’s nothing like being there in person, I’ll offer you a few of the lessons that brought on the biggest breakthroughs for the group.

1. The Big Lie: We spent 10 minutes making a list of the big lies that shaped our lives. Once you can name the lie, you can trace how unraveling it transforms your narrator on the page — because the story of a memoir is the story of coming to see the truth.

   The prompt: Write down the lie you once believed and the truth you now know.

2. The Stranger Across the Street: I asked everyone to imagine their past self standing across the street. What do they look like? What life are they living?

   The prompt: Write about a moment when your past self and your present-day self collide on the page.

3. The Choice You Didn’t Make: We all have that pivotal moment where we wonder what would have happened if we’d made other choices in our lives. We spent 30 minutes writing about the choice we didn’t make and where that might have led us.

   The prompt: Use the word “perhaps” to show us the path you didn’t take or the choice you didn’t make. What would your life have been like if you had chosen that path?

Hit reply and tell me what the Big Lie prompt surfaced.

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I hope to see you at Omega next year!

In community,

Ruthie

Why do all my toiletries leak as soon as I put them in my bag? My friend Amy intuited this about me and bought me this pouch for my birthday. I couldn’t be happier.

For those in NYC: how about a bead night with your buds or your kid? I’m taking Clementine on August 5th. Join me!

Support public radio – and look cute while doing it.

My new fave lipstick, but when did lipstick become so expensive?

From my tattoo to my earrings to this robe, I now want evil eyes on everything.

My hat is finally shipping this week and I couldn’t be more excited.

If you’re like me and you love mixing prints, head on over to Kasmaria.

Everyone has an opinion on what women are doing wrong when it comes to motherhood. If you don’t have kids, society is outraged. If you do and you stay home, you’re a trad wife. If you try really hard to have a kid, you’re an “addict,” which is what many of the commenters on this essay in The Cut had to say. But what few are talking about because of the silence and shame surrounding it are donor eggs. Watch my recent reel (which is popping off!) talking more about this topic:

Sit back, relax, and enjoy Joseph’s insights.

Buy A Copy of Spawning Season

What do you wish you knew before writing your memoir?

For me, the process of writing is of finding-out. Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

There was nothing more perplexing to me than almost-having a kid; nothing made me reconsider my parents, and my relationship to my parents, like almost having a kid of my own. My own identity, my desires, my sex, my needs and my wants, and the differences between them. I found, as I wormed my way toward parenthood, that I’d been lying to myself about the reasons I never wanted to be a dad at all. And that I didn’t like many of the reasons why I wanted to be a parent in the first place – they were a part of my messy inheritance – but I found I couldn’t change them.

So, I’m glad I was unaware of so much when it came to my desire to have kids, and then my almost-having of a kid. I was so surprised by so much of my emotional (and subsequent rational) reaction that I was writing constantly. There are so many more words I wrote through this process than went into the final book. The book itself is almost like an erasure, or marble bust, chipping away at the rectangular block of stone until an object appeared.

What inspired the idea for your book?

The book is fundamentally about a void – the child I almost, could have, didn’t have. The book made that experience into a thing I could hold in the real world, this world.

The salmon story isn’t a metaphor either; we called our could-have-been-child a baby fish. Before the book, she came and spoke to me. Now, she’s still here, and the book can live on with other people, in other homes, and I hope it can find people to nourish as much as a warm cup of broth.

Any practical tips or routines for sitting down to write?

I am the rare writer who enjoys writing, but the writing of this book moved past enjoyment itself; it was compulsive, inevitable. I generated thousands of words, and then thousands more, all of them words I needed, but few, few, few of them words the book needed. I was dealing with the alarming quiet of not having a kid after years of planning to have one. I woke up in a quiet apartment imagining the noise an infant or toddler would have been making, and, to dispel the quiet, I filled my computer with my own noise.

This is not a way to write a book.

So for me, the most difficult part of writing – be it a book, a poem, an essay – is finding the form that allows the words to become something more than private writing. Ideas will kick around my head for years, even a decade, and only become something once I’ve found the craft that allows the piece to form. This sometimes requires more patience than the put-your-butt-in-the-seat and write-every-day advice we so often hear. The nice thing about writing is that I always have a few things, some short and some book-length, in the hopper, so I can make progress on one thing while another – like a book about the grief of not having a kid – incubates on the back burner.

How has your idea of being a “successful writer” changed since publishing a book?

Being a successful anything is a moving target. Especially anything artistic. I don’t know what to say, so I’ll tell a short story.

My parents were both foresters when I was born, and I grew up in the woods. On a hike, there’s a term “fool’s peak” for when, hours into a hike, you think the summit is in view, only to come closer and realize the peak you saw wasn’t the highest or tallest after all, and you’ve got to keep climbing. There’s one hike back home, Mount Dickerman, which is almost nine miles in-and-out and climbs nearly 4,000 feet from the riverbed in the valley to the mountain top at nearly 6000 feet, with views of Twin Peaks and the rest of the Cascade Mountains.

The trail must have a dozen fool’s peaks, but the views at the top are stunning, my favorite of any hike I’ve ever done. The last time I went, I brought my partner Devon, whose knees almost gave out on the last mile back down to the car. I’d given him options, and he wanted to do my favorite hike, the hardest one with the best views. He loved it, and decided that the climb and the views were worth the pain. It was early August and the mountain blueberries were ripe, there were more on the trail that we could eat, and a few huckleberries here and there, and I was confident enough in my plant identification that we ate them sure of their huckleberry-ness – that they weren’t poisonous. It felt good to gorge on blueberries and also know we’d be leaving plenty behind for other hikers later that day, and the next.

I used to think that the view from the top was a false image of success that we’d never reach, that the fool’s peaks were all there was, so it was best to enjoy them and keep walking uphill. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and all that, with creative toil being the boulder we push uphill. Now, I believe success is the mountain blueberries, and that they alone make the sore knees worth it, and there will always be enough for other hikers.

What’s one myth about publishing a book you want to dispel?

That there is ever an arrival that will make everything easy. Most of the most famous and well-reviewed writers still teach to pay their bills. Every time I reach a milestone that I think will Make Everything Easier (getting an agent, selling my first CNF proposal), a whole new set of frustrations pop up (the proposal sold for peanuts, editors view me as a nonfiction not a fiction writer, book sales are generally down, especially for queer-ass writing).

All this is to say that while publishing books is amazing and important (readers do half of the work of writing), I have found it more and more essential to find value that is intrinsic to the work itself and not tied to industry outcomes. A single reader DM or email about their loneliness over a failed IVF becoming less lonely for the 197 pages of my book is the value I need from it. The community of writers and readers that I’ve built over the many years who show up for one another is more important to me than any number of prizes or megawatt book advances (but maybe I only say the latter because I’ve never had one). Here. Taste the mountain blueberries, you know?

What piece of advice would you give to other writers who want to have a book published?

Find your people. Don’t give up your weird – it might make you difficult to sell at auction, but it’s what will make your work transformative to the people who need it.

What was the most surprising thing you learned along the way?

I never stop being surprised these days. I’m 43, and nearly everything about middle age surprises me. Perhaps this is because I come from a family with a mythology that leans heavily into the heteronormative: one gets older, gets married, has kids, has job, lives “happily ever after.” Of course there is no “happily ever after” for anyone alive, as living is pretty much a guarantee of grief, and dying means others will grieve you.

Even if there were a “happily ever after,” I wouldn’t want it. Happy people don’t write books. I would give up a million flatly happy days for one day of terrifyingly human connection.

According to Roland Barthes in The Lover’s Discourse, our inability to merge with the beloved other is why we make art. Maybe. But the earth itself can also be a beloved other, or the sea, a tree, a hamster hemmed in by wheels and tunnels. We love these things, and cannot become them, and so we yearn. We merge with the earth only once, and our molecules will feed some grass and trees, but we won’t be around to see it. Until then: Art.

And I think the great relief of still-living is that art is a receptacle for our surprise. And when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, hurt, alone – in addition to ecstatic, joyful, sexual, full of pleasure and lust – in our art, this breaks the most harmful myths of all, those of the deadening “happily ever afters.” Lust ever after. Grief ever after. Chosen family ever after. Art ever after. Writing ever after, amen.

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Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Joseph Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.

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I could feel her anxiety through the phone and I knew she was spinning around several book ideas. So I wrote back, “If you had to start writing tomorrow, which book would you write?”

I saw the three dots light up my screen. She was hesitating, terrified of choosing the wrong one.

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Twenty minutes later, my phone dinged. She’d had a breakthrough. I didn’t choose her book for her. I just asked the right question.

Over the last seven years, I’ve worked with hundreds of writers and I can tell you, most books aren’t stuck. What I see over and over is a book that has stalled because one of five questions isn’t answered. Why am I the only one who could write this book? Which book am I writing? What shape will hold it? Why does it matter now? And what will the reader walk away with?

Here’s how to diagnose yourself:

Problem 1: You have more than one book and you’re trying to write them all at once

The tell: You have notebooks full of material, maybe multiple false-start drafts and a nagging feeling that the book keeps changing shape every time you sit down. Some days it’s about your divorce. Some days it’s about your career. Some days it’s the family history project. When people ask what your book is about, your answer takes four minutes.

Your first move: Write a single paragraph of jacket copy the way it would appear on the back cover for each book living in your head. Then ask yourself — which one of these can only be written by me, right now, at this point in my life? That’s your book.

Problem 2: You have the book, but not the structure that will hold it

The tell: You know exactly what your book is about. You can talk about it beautifully at dinner parties. But your draft is a pile of scenes, notes and fragments that don’t add up to anything and every time you try to assemble them you end up reorganizing paragraphs instead of writing.

Your first move: Stop writing new material for one week. Instead, read the openings of three books doing something adjacent to yours and reverse-engineer their structure. Is it chronological? Braided? Organized around questions, objects, places? Then ask yourself: What is the experience I want my reader to have and in what order?

Problem 3: The stakes aren’t clear

The tell: You’re writing pages, but they feel flat. And when you imagine a stranger reading them, your inner critic asks, so what?

Your first move: Answer this question: what will be lost if this doesn’t get resolved and why does it have to be resolved now? If you can’t explain what’s at risk, your reader won’t be able to feel it and they’ll put the book down.

Problem 4: You’re reporting what happened instead of offering what you’ve learned along the way

The tell: Your beta readers respond with: wow, you’ve been through so much instead of this changed how I see my own life.

Your first move: Take one chapter and highlight every sentence that recounts an event in one color and every sentence that reflects, interprets, or makes meaning in another. Most stuck drafts are 90 percent event and 10 percent meaning. If that’s the case, ask yourself: what does the reader walk away with when they close my book?

Notice that none of these problems is solved by writing more. They’re solved by answering a question you’ve been avoiding. The diagnosis is the easy part; the untangling is the work we do together.

Which of these problems do you see yourself in? What question do you need to answer?

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In Community,

Ruthie

I’ve heard many authors, even those you’d think have some kind of magical connection to the writing muse (Cheryl Strayed, for example!), say that every book is like starting from ground zero all over again. Writing one book doesn’t give you special powers or prowess to write the next one.

So after spending the last 5+ years writing and promoting my memoir The Mother Code I’m now deep in the trenches of my next book and feeling all the feels all over again: vulnerability, insecurity and the big whopper, will this ever be anything-ness?

The idea for this book came to me while writing The Mother Code, but I didn’t start on it in earnest until last July. All I knew was that Rob and I had five embryos leftover from our IVF cycle and I felt stuck, unsure what to do with the sack of cells we’d vowed to discard once we had our one-and-done baby.

So, that’s the premise. The stakes. The tension. We have embryos. I’m an adamantly pro-choice woman. Why can’t I just toss them or donate them to science?

But then the question becomes: why would anyone but the 1.5 million Americans with frozen embryos in storage care about my conundrum? There are kids starving to death and people dying and bombs dropping and environmental annihilation happening everywhere we turn. Who cares about our embryos?

That’s the thing, though. Writing a book means making readers see why they should care. It means making readers understand why something that impacts your life also impacts theirs even if they haven’t realized it yet.

I know deep in my heart that what embryos are isn’t just a me question, but one that society needs to grapple with. I know this because the question of what embryos are has moved from my private struggle into the courts, the legislature, and the media. Because a Brooklyn judge just ruled on an embryo custody dispute. Because states can’t agree. Alabama says embryos are children, New York says they’re research material, and Pennsylvania says they’re something in between. Because that ambiguity is now determining who can and can’t access fertility medicine. I know this because there are op-eds that show us that the majority of this country is not pro-choice or pro-life but somewhere in the middle. I know this because authors I admire, like Jessica Valenti and Anna Louis Sussman, are writing important think pieces on embryo personhood and beyond.

The stakes couldn’t be higher – questions about embryos force us to decide what we think life and aliveness and potential for life really mean. They are questions that affect all of us – whether you have embryos in storage yourself or whether you believe women should control their own bodies. Because how we define embryos now will determine what reproductive choices exist in ten years.

All of this is to say: I’ve been deep in it for a year. And the hardest part hasn’t been figuring out what to do with my embryos. It’s understanding why you should care what I do with mine. Because the answer isn’t only personal. It’s political. And it’s coming to a court, a legislature, and a ballot measure near you.

My newest pages are with my agent right now and we’re meeting this week to discuss them. Until then, I’m waiting on the edge of my seat wondering if I’ve convinced her not only why she should care but why embryos will be the next great reproductive battle of our lifetimes.

In Community,

Ruthie

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Look, we love them. We really do. But if the men in your life are anything like the men in mine, there are certain... gaps. In knowledge, in context, and in the basic understanding of what it has meant, historically and personally, to move through the world in a female body.

The good news: there’s a book for that. Several, actually.

So this Father’s Day, skip the grill accessories, the socks and the pocket knife – and instead hand them one of these. Then pour yourself a glass of something good, and let literature do the heavy lifting.

Six books to share with the men in your life this Father’s Day:

Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit. Short, readable, and oh so on the nose.

Hunger, Roxane Gay. Visceral and unflinching on body, desire, and what women learn to carry.

Know My Name, Chanel Miller. For the men who thought they understood #MeToo. They didn’t.

All Fours, Miranda July. Weird, brilliant, and will start a conversation. Possibly an argument. Worth it either way.

Belabored, Lyz Lenz. For anyone who has ever been pregnant and thought: why does everyone keep lying to me about this?

Down Girl, Kate Manne. Hand this to the man who says he doesn’t see misogyny. He’ll see it by chapter two.

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In community,

Ruthie

UPCOMING CLASS

My fall Kickstarter starts October 6th. Waitlist is open if you want early access to enrollment and a bonus 30-minute 1:1 call with me to use anytime during the 8 week class.

Join the waitlist

Sit back, relax, and enjoy Sara’s insights on the realities of memoir writing, finding time to write as a mom, how her targets for success have changed, fact checking in nonfiction writing, and so much more. Read on for the full interview and check out her memoir, Mother Tongue.

Buy A Copy of Mother Tongue

What do you wish you knew before writing your memoir?

I think I knew this a little before, but man is writing a memoir embarrassing! Having to sit with all the dubious choices Middle and High School Sara made was embarrassing all over again, though ultimately once I waded through the big feelings, it was interesting to see the connective tissue that binds one’s life together. We don’t really think about our lives as having, “themes,” or at least I didn’t, but after writing a memoir, it’s clear that they do!

I also think it took me a while to pry myself away from the notion that a memoir has to be chronological. Once I let the book’s structure be determined by the content rather than what I thought a memoir should be (what, as I’ve learned, People of the Internet still believe it must be 😅) the writing became easier and the book got richer.

What inspired the idea for your book?

Mother Tongue started out as notes to my sons, so originally it was written in second person, with different chapters functioning as different letters to each boy. As I wrote, I realized that it increasingly didn’t make sense to try to parse out discrete parts of myself or them, so I ended up restructuring the book around thematic elements that spoke to both of them instead.

Any practical tips or routines for sitting down to write?

I don’t have much of a writing routine right now, with a newborn and two others home for the summer. Often I compose paragraphs in the shower, memorize them, and then run to write them down when I have a minute. I can’t say I recommend that, but I do actually think that having a time constraint on when I can write is useful to me--it makes me value that time more, and I find a little pressure helpful. Maybe a bit like how poets self-impose language-based constraints in order to write a better poem. I also write by hand, because I’m a control freak and if I started something on the computer, I would just write and delete the same sentence over and over again forever. If you, too, are like this, I highly recommend hand-writing to keep things moving forward.

How has your idea of being a “successful writer” changed since publishing a book?

When I first started thinking of myself as a writer, publishing seemed like the end all be all to me. Now with each subsequent book, my idea of success changes because I set new goals for myself. I do have a kind of “bucket list” of things I want to do with my writing--places I want to be published, more business-based achievement things, but probably my biggest indicator of success is when people read my work and tell me about their connections to the story and characters. Both of my novels, and this memoir, too, deal with marginalized groups, so hearing from readers who say,”I saw myself in this”--that’s the best feeling ever.

What’s one myth about publishing a book you want to dispel?

Whew! There are so many strange myths floating around out there! One that seems to have taken hold recently is that you need to have X amount of followers on Y platform to get a publisher to consider your work. And while I’m sure a big following on social media might be an appealing bonus to a publisher, particularly for nonfiction writers, not being TikTok famous simply isn’t a dealbreaker--just write a good book.

Another one--at least judging from the amount of AI spam trying to sell me pay-to-play book club appearances and SEO marketing packages--is that writers are making a lot of money from their books and have cash to burn. The structure of publishing contracts and advances do not lend themselves to stability; very few people are able to write as their full time job. Basically, neither money-making nor fame are good reasons to write books!

What piece of advice would you give to other writers who want to have a book published?

Enjoy this pre-publishing time! I know this probably sounds like annoying advice when you are excited and anxious to get published, but for real; never again will you be able to write freely without a thought to what your audience might like, dislike, send you hate mail about. You can get back to an approximation of not caring about this, eventually, but it will take a bit of work, so take advantage of doing your weirdest writing right now while no one’s watching.

What was the most surprising thing you learned along the way?

I learned that publishers don’t fact-check nonfiction books! How terrifying! I hired my own fact-checker, because it’s important to me that the facts in my book are factual, and I also kept copious endnotes, which are available on my website. Learning this really changed the way I thought about books and media literacy, and explains a lot about our collective understanding of “truth” and how we arrived at this particular political and educational moment.

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Mother Tongue reflects on Sara's life both before and after parenthood and is a remarkable portrait of America through reflections on some of its most complex histories: the rise of the Christian right, the thorny world of international adoption, and above all, the deaf and disabled communities’ stubborn survival in the face of persistent oppression.

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I want to show you the difference, using a moment from my own memoir.

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Summary tells us what happened.

Once I was safely home, I checked the bathroom and confirmed there was more blood. I showed Rob. I couldn’t stop panicking.

You understand this. But you’re not inside of it.

Scene drops us into a specific moment and lets it unfold in real time.

Here’s how I actually wrote it in my memoir:

I came out, my underwear still down around my thighs, and called to Rob. “Blood. Blood,” I said, pointing, hoping he would verify whether there was in fact blood in my underwear. He tried to calm me. “Everything is okay,” he said, stepping forward and holding my cheeks gently between his palms.

The scene version doesn’t tell you I was terrified and needed someone else to confirm my own reality. It doesn’t need to. The underwear around my thighs does it. The fragmented speech does it. Rob holding my cheeks in his palms does it.

This is what separates memoir from a therapy session or even a journal entry. In therapy, you process the experience. In memoir, you re-enter it. The reader needs the underwear still around your thighs, the specific words you said, the precise gesture your partner made. The specificity is what jolts the reader emotionally. It’s what allows the reader to recognize themselves in your story.

The test I give writers is to read a paragraph of your own work and ask yourself: am I reporting what happened, or am I inside the moment? If you’re reporting, you’re in summary. If you’re in the moment, you’re in scene.

Most first drafts are 80% summary. Summary is how we find the story. Scene is how we tell it.

Try this: Take one paragraph from your memoir or essay that you know is in summary. Pick one specific moment within it and rewrite it as a scene. Give us a location. Where are we? What time of day is it? What season is it? What are you doing in that place? Use dialogue without explaining what it means. Let the reader be a fly on the wall so we can be there with you.

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In Community,

Ruthie

P.S. My fall Kickstarter starts October 6th. Waitlist is open if you want early access to enrollment and a bonus 30-minute 1:1 call with me to use anytime during the 8 week class.

But the truth is that I didn’t escape unscathed. After my daughter Clementine was born I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. I worried that I’d accidentally scald her tiny body in the bathtub. Or drop her when we took our daily walks. I cried for what seemed like no reason. Looking back there were plenty of reasons to cry. It was 2020 and we were all trapped in a world ruled by Covid-19. Not only that, but having a baby is hard even without a global pandemic.

May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month and yet too few of us talk about our experiences. Society tells us to take meds, to muscle through, to move on. And plenty of us do. There are costs though. Instead of connection and community around the hard stuff, we feel isolated and estranged. Instead of understanding that we’re not alone, we imagine that no one has ever been through this before.

Instead of silence around our struggles as mothers (and humans), let’s share our stories. Instead of pretending we’re a-okay, let’s normalize asking for, and offering, help.

In Community,

Ruthie

If you want to read more about my story with maternal mental health, I published a piece for Oprah Daily on my mother’s struggles and how that impacted my own experience with maternal ambivalence.

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Last chance to sign up for my summer kickstarter! Meeting weekly starting June 2nd, my 8-week kickstarter will help you get your creative juices flowing or get you unstuck.

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And if you are craving some quality time to dedicate to your writing – in a beautiful place with plenty of time for rest and recharging – I am leading a writing workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY this July 12-17. Learn more and sign up.

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I’m especially excited to work alongside such an incredible group of women. Diving into their stories, shaping structure and voice, and helping position their memoirs for agents (and my very own agent Jane Von Mehren will be mentoring alongside me as well!). In between classes, I’m looking forward to slow mornings with my own writing, long dinners under the Tuscan sky, and a little space to rest, reset, and make a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile.

In case you’re wondering what made the cut, here are the books I’m bringing along. Fair warning: it’s a mix of grief, philosophy, and science–maybe not the most obvious vacation lineup, but at this point, would you expect anything else?

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

A short, poetic story about a father and his two sons learning to live with loss after their mother dies, helped along by a strange, talking crow. It’s sad, funny, and surprisingly comforting.

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg

A dark, dreamlike novel about a struggling professor whose life spirals into a strange and unsettling world. It blends horror and social themes to explore identity, power, and survival––my favorite type of book.

The Blindspot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Evan Thompson, and Marcelo Gleiser

This book explains why science can’t fully understand reality without considering human consciousness and experience. It makes big ideas about the mind and the universe feel clear and engaging. I’ve been fascinated by Blindspot since reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, and hearing Michael recommend it on Ezra Klein’s podcast.

When We Cease to Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut

A gripping mix of fact and fiction about scientists whose discoveries changed the world in unsettling ways. It shows how the search for knowledge can lead to both brilliance and danger. I will report back on what I learn!

What weird, unusual, or quirky books are currently on your TBR list?

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My 8-week kickstarter will help you get your creative juices flowing or get you unstuck. Through in-class exercises, optional homework assignments, one-on-one workshopping of long-form pieces, a magical mystery box of supplemental reading and listening recommendations, and more, you’ll find a sustainable writing flow that will allow you to generate work like you never have before. Our summer cohort meets weekly starting June 2nd.

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After over seven years editing, advising and strategizing with clients on their book projects, I’ve pinpointed the speed bumps that most people hit on the road to publication. Understanding these hurdles can help you plan ahead, mapping out where you might need to invest more time (and money) to help you cross the finish line.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and it’s not meant to scare you. It’s meant to shine a light into the dark tunnel so you can see what’s ahead.

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Here are the 5 most common hurdles that may be standing in the way of your book dream:

• You don’t pinpoint your publishing goals up front so you end up spinning your wheels and/or spending time and money heading down the wrong publishing path.

• You haven’t poked and prodded your book concept to make sure it’s solid before starting to write.

• You haven’t formulated a clear takeaway/argument that addresses the readers’ pain points, not just your own.

• You haven’t figured out how you’re going to talk about and market your book, which is its own superpower — very different than writing.

• You’re still waiting for a savior to swoop in to identify how to sell your book to your audience when ensuring your ideas connect with media outlets, social media and communities far and wide will ultimately fall on you.

• BONUS: You haven’t aligned your “brand”/business/platform with your book so that your website, LinkedIn, social media and talking points are all reinforcing your expertise and/or the book’s message.

Which one of these have been a stumbling block for you? Are there any you would add to the list? What advice would you give to someone feeling stuck in the process of writing or publishing their book?

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If you resonate with any or all of these, hiring a book writing coach (like me!) or signing up for a book incubator to hold you accountable, shed a light on the black box of the publishing industry and give you community to support you through the process of writing and publishing a book could be a great way to keep moving forward towards your book writing dreams.

Learn More About IWC

I have one spot left for my 6-month Book Builder which starts Wednesday, May 13. This six-month writing boot camp will help you get words on the page and develop the structure and connective tissue that will give your book its glue. It is a combo of both group workshops and individual sessions to keep you on track to complete a roadmap of your book and the first two to three chapters (or more!).

If you’re interested in joining us, reply back to this email or fill out the application today!

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If you are looking for community and accountability for your writing practice but aren’t working on a book or longer term project, my 8-week kickstarter is a perfect class to help you get your creative juices flowing. Our summer cohort meets weekly starting June 2nd. Learn more.

Before The Mother Code was published on May 6, 2025, I scrawled a wish list of my hopes and dreams for the memoir I’d spent five years of my life writing, not to mention all the living it took to fill its pages.

• An essay in The Cut

• A “Personal History” piece in the New Yorker

• An interview with Terry Gross

• An episode on one of my favorite podcast’s Death, Sex and Money

• A NYT Book Review: “a good review of course :)” I cheekily added

You know, small wins.

My publicity team was kind enough not to laugh at me. They just emailed back: “This is our wish list too :)” and left it at that.

Dear Reader, in case it’s not obvious yet, none of these dreams came true.

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Instead what this last year taught me is this: you can’t even imagine the doors that will open to you when you put your heart (and mind) out into the world.

I never could have conjured the conversations big, and small, that I’d have with those who connected with my words. The families I’d meet when Victoria Nino asked me to lead two of her groups for those exploring donor conception. The opportunities I’d have to share my story in front of hundreds at events like Generation Women, Mom 2.0, The Uplifters Live and Deep Water Literary Festival, to name a few. The retreats I’d be asked to teach this year in Tuscany and at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

If I could go back and tell Ruthie from a year ago anything it would be to stop trying to guess what the future will bring and just enjoy it as it comes. Because when we try to grasp at control and certainty we always miss the mark. It’s not that we shouldn’t dream big. It’s that there are a lot of ways success could look that we can’t even imagine.

No, I didn’t become a bestseller on any list, anywhere.

My book is not coming out in paperback anytime soon.

Gwyneth is not playing me in the movie (nor will Adam Driver be my on-screen husband).

But writing a book is a long game. My life has been profoundly changed for the better. I feel more confident that I have something to say and that others will listen. Hundreds of people have reached out to tell me that my words have made them feel less alone. My book sells a dozen+ copies a week. And I never have to wonder “what if” I’d followed my dream.

Also, I got to be on DR. BECKY’S PODCAST.

There are so many things to say about the boulder authors need to push up the mountain in order to publish a book. The truth, though, is that I’ve built a life where I’m a writer and this book is just the first of many, I hope.

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In Community,

Ruthie

My dear friend drew The Mother Code and I don’t think I ever shared it on here. Be sure to check out her incredible newsletter. And one more shameless plug…order a copy if you haven’t already!

In case you want to take a trip down memory lane with me, here are a few more posts about the process of publishing The Mother Code:

The Spark ✨

My Book Comes Out Today ✨

I’ve been waiting for this day for three years, or maybe my whole life. It’s pub day and that means you can walk into any bookstore and see my book on the shelf. And not just any book, but my memoir, the very real and raw path I took to finally deciding whether motherhood was right for me…

Read more

a year ago · 36 likes · 32 comments · Ruthie Ackerman

The Spark ✨

THANK YOU!!!! For Reading, For Everything.

My pub date came and went and I am still in shock at the outpouring of love and support for this book…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 6 comments · Ruthie Ackerman

The Spark ✨

What I Wish I Knew Before I Went On Book Tour.

Book Tour Expectation vs. Reality…

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a year ago · 30 likes · 17 comments · Ruthie Ackerman

The Spark ✨

What I Wish I Knew Before Trying to Write a Book

Set Yourself Up For Success…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Ruthie Ackerman

The Spark ✨

The Mother Code Is Almost 6 Months Old!

One of the good things about working on other people’s books is this: I get a front row seat on how authors get readers to pony up $30 to buy their books. So, I knew going into pub day that if I wanted anyone to hear the tree (my book!) falling in the forest, I was going to have to be the one running around shouting…

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10 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Ruthie Ackerman

LAST CALL! My 6-month Book Builder program is a combo of both group workshops and individual sessions to keep you on track to complete a roadmap of your book and the first two to three chapters (or more!). My next cohort starts on May 13, 2026. Apply today! Only a few spots left.

My 8-week kickstarter will help you get your creative juices flowing or get you unstuck. Our summer cohort meets weekly starting June 2nd. Learn more.

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Tensions arise when the narrator is supposed to want something, but they actually want something else.

This is true for creative nonfiction and fiction. And is even true for leadership or “big ideas” books. A book about how to lead with confidence is really about how to stand in your own power despite society’s expectations that you shrink and contort yourself. A book about living your values is really about the desire to stay true to yourself even when the world is pushing you to sell out or become someone different.

Here’s an exercise I use to help clients identify desires vs. expectations:

Part A — Two columns: Draw a line down the page and set a timer for 5 minutes.

• Left column: What I was supposed to want

• Right column: What I actually want / wanted / feared wanting

You don’t need to write full sentences— fragments, images, or single words are fine.

A few examples from my book, The Mother Code, to light a spark of inspiration:

1. I was supposed to stay in my first marriage because he was a “good” guy. What I actually wanted was to be in a relationship where I could explore all the facets of me, even the tiny seed that wanted to be a mother.

2. I was supposed to give up my dream of being a writer in order to be a mother. What I actually wanted was to be both a mother and a writer—and see examples of other women (and humans) who were fully self-actualized and parents too.

Part B — Sprint: Pick the pair on your list that creates the most electricity — the pairing that makes you feel slightly vulnerable. Now take 10 minutes to write a scene, a memory, or an imagined moment where those two things collide.

Debrief (5 min): Did anything you write surprise you? Surprise is the signal that you’ve hit something true.

I’d love to hear what came out of this exercise for you! Feel free to leave me a comment below.

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In community,

Ruthie

My 6-month Book Builder program is a combo of both group workshops and individual sessions to keep you on track to complete a roadmap of your book and the first two to three chapters (or more!). My next cohort starts on May 13, 2026. Apply today! Only a few spots left.

My 8-week kickstarter will help you get your creative juices flowing or get you unstuck. Our summer cohort meets weekly starting June 2nd. Learn more.

See all upcoming classes

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Here are some of the things I have been doing that have nothing to do with AI:

Lifting weights

Leaving my clothes on my chair like I’m still 16

Doing the same puzzle over and over with my daughter

Trying (and failing) to get in 10,000 steps

Drinking my morning coffee

Drinking my daily Pamplemousse La Croix (can someone please tell me what flavor that is?)

Reading actual books made out of paper from my TBR pile

Sitting on the couch early in the morning hoping no one wakes up so I can read the weekend newspaper in peace

Standing on stage reading from my book at Miss Manhattan’s reading series at Niagara

Noticing the tulips at every bodega

Leaving voice memos for my friends (voice memos are my love language)

Listening to Ezra Klein and Michael Pollan talk about consciousness

Eating a home cooked meal made for me by Rob

Cuddling in bed with Rob and Clem

Smelling the Neroli cleaning spray I use to clean the counters

Writing book number 2

Walking my daughter to school

Thinking

Breathing

Staring into space

The next time you feel overwhelmed by the thought of AI taking over your life, remember that it will never replace seeing the early spring flowers blooming, hearing your loved ones laugh, or the smell of your favorite room spray.

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In Community,

Ruthie

A colleague of mine, Lee Bonvissuto, is running a free live workshop on April 16 called Confident in Any Room. It’s for people who are confident most of the time but whose voice goes unpredictable in certain rooms. If that sounds like someone you know, or like you, it’s worth checking out. Register here.

My 6-month Book Builder program is a combo of both group workshops and individual sessions to keep you on track to complete a roadmap of your book and the first two to three chapters (or more!). My next cohort starts on May 13, 2026. Applications now open.

See All Upcoming Classes

It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie writer who’s never written anything at all. Or someone with 10 bestsellers. Every time you sit down to the page to start something new is like learning to walk for the first time. You wobble. You shake. You fall down. And what separates those who finish writing their books from those who don’t? You keep going.

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But the thing most people don’t talk about is that persistence isn’t just a trick of mind over body. It’s not only about permission and confidence and creative entitlement, though those things are critical too. It’s also about what you do when you hit the inevitable dead end.

In writing The Mother Code there were dead ends and there were DEAD ENDS:

• For a long time I knew what I was trying to say (ie. the plot points I wanted to hit) but I had no idea what all those plot points added up to.

• It turned out the opening of my book was actually a chapter I thought would be toward the end. Until I flipped the whole structure around, I couldn’t cross the finish line of my first draft.

• No matter how many rabbit holes I went down I could only find records for 14 of my great-grandmother’s marriages (not the 25 my mother swore she’d had).

But the DEAD END that sticks out to me the most is the one that changed everything I thought I knew about my life. I’d decided to not have children because I’d always been told that my great-grandmother and my grandmother had abandoned their children. There must be something wrong with our DNA, I believed. The Mother Code was my attempt to uncover that genetic flaw. Except, there was no genetic flaw. My great-grandmother and grandmother were broken humans, like all of us, and they made decisions about their children and their lives based on the choices they had at the time. I’d been looking for the smoking gun but what I found instead was compassion. That “dead end” turned out to be the turning point for my book. Not only did my ancestors not have a “bad mother” gene, but I didn’t either.

I never would have known that, though, if I’d given up when I lost my digital recorder that held the interviews with my Great Uncle who had died. Or if I threw in the towel when the stories I’d heard from family members didn’t match the document trail I found. Contradicting information, and even lack of information, is a breadcrumb you can follow out of the dark woods of writing.

I’m now working on my second book and I’ve already hit what feels like a major dead end. I’d reached out three times to the media team at a major cancer hospital in NYC to speak to a pair of scientists whose research is key to my premise, but they didn’t respond. After weeks I finally tracked down someone else I knew who’s a famous researcher at the same hospital, but he passed along the message that they won’t speak to me because of their fears of bringing attention to their work given the current climate in DC.

I was considering giving up when I sent an email to a group of very connected women I know. The husband of one of them works in biotech as a neuroscientist and gave me a hot tip: reach out to the company founded based on the research of the scientists I was hoping to interview. “Perhaps the team there will be more responsive,” he offered. Later that day I already had a call with the head of the media team scheduled. Jackpot.

Dead ends are not a sign that your project is doomed or not worthy. They are a feature of any essay or book, not a bug. The moral of the story: keep going. You never know what you’ll find on the other side.

In Community,

Ruthie

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Read on for the full interview and check out her latest novel Clutch. And be sure to follow her Substack, .

Buy A Copy of Clutch

What do you wish you knew before writing your novel?

I wrote the first draft of Clutch very quickly (for me)—in just under a year. I knew, in my gut, that the heart was there, the plot and the characters were spot on, and honestly, I thought it was a slam dunk. I wish I had known I’d have to reconsider every beat, every word choice, over the course of the next eighteen months. Sure, I had the “core mission” of the book locked in, but the language was messy, repetitive, imprecise, and my meanderings were real. I don’t regret writing it fast, but I wish I could’ve seen when and how to tune my own prose at speed. I got there—my editor and copy editor helped, and I think I went above and beyond what they were asking of me, in terms of fine-tuning—but I would have loved to have applied that steely objectivity and high bar for language into earlier drafts. Next book goals!

What inspires the ideas for your books?

Every project (two books, and a bunch of stories, at this point) is different, but I think a thing that continues to fascinate me is how we live with one another. How do communities support themselves, how do stakeholders compete and hurt one another, work at cross purposes? What ties us together, what drives us apart? I am talking about communities in the most liberal sense—baseball teams, friend groups, cities and towns, all sorts of places.

Any practical tips or routines for sitting down to write?

I’m not one of those “write every day” writers—an idea has to percolate for days, weeks, months before I feel ready to sit down and write. For that reason, I try to keep a few projects running, at different stages of development at any given time: I’m thinking about one idea, reading on background and considering the dimensions of it. I’m making early attempts at drafting something else, and maybe revising a third piece. I can sense when I hit terminal velocity on a new draft, and then I shove off development and revision for a while, and give the new piece my full attention. This is not entirely efficient—I’ll be the first to admit I procrastinate by way of research—but it works well enough.

How has your idea of being a “successful writer” changed since publishing a book?

How to answer this one? I got a very modest advance for Clutch—think a few months of the mortgage—and then I woke up on pub day to a glowing review in the New York Times. I’ve known this for a long time, but it reminded me that you have to decouple the merit of your creative expression from the dollar signs. Sometimes they line up, of course, and great books go to auction and get supported from the very start. But sometimes, you just have to believe in the work, and keep going.

What’s one myth about publishing a book you want to dispel?

See above. Not every book’s merit correlates directly with its advance, or the size of its publishing house. I also want to advocate for midcareer, midlist writers—the people who never became literary rockstars (those folks can write and be supported throughout their career), but who are still working hard and writing well, writing even better than their debuts, as they move into second, third, fourth books. Publishing gets really excited about the buzzy debut and those proven, marquee names, but I wish there was more support for the middle of the pack as they move through their literary journey.

What piece of advice would you give to other writers who want to have a book published?

Keep going! It will take longer, and take more out of you than you can imagine. But if you’re enjoying the process of writing, of revising and improving that idea that got you to the desk in the first place, the journey can be continually joyful.

What was the most surprising thing you learned along the way?

I learned a lot about my friendships while writing this book. What was beautiful about them, sure, but I also was working through a lot of the painful stuff of friendships, when my friends and I have let each other down. Being so honest about that, I think I came to an understand of how I could do better at supporting the people I care about, being more present for them without regressing to the cuddle puddle of young adulthood, when we were all in physical proximity and didn’t have that much in the way of external responsibilities. I’m really touched when I talk to readers who say Clutch helped them reach some similar conclusion—that it makes them think about the past and future of their friendships, and see the value of those relationships in a new light.

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Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

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Connect with Emily

This list is a mix of books that challenge, disrupt, and expand what we think we know about women’s lives, bodies, and history. Some made me angry, some blew my mind, and some made me feel seen in a way I didn’t expect. All of them left a mark. If you’re looking for reads that question the status quo and remind you just how much there is to reclaim as a woman in today’s world, start here.

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

A fascinating read about the woman behind gene editing, the invention that answers questions about the origins of life but also forces us to wrestle with some of the most profound ethical issues of our time.

Eve by Cat Bohannon

Did you know that the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution? Neither did I. That’s because hiding the wonders of women is a feature of the patriarchal system we live under. Read this book for a revision of human history that’s urgent and eye-opening.

Vagina Obscura by Rachel E Gross

A book about vaginas? Yes, please. In a world that shies away from researching and writing about female bodies, this book is an invitation and an ode to one of the most misunderstood organs.

Belabored by Lyz Lenz

This book was one of my bibles when I was writing The Mother Code. It helped give me the confidence to turn my memoir into a manifesto of sorts and let my rage roar.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden

T Kira’s first novel brings together three women in the aftermath of a man’s murder. But not just any man. A man who sexually assaulted two of them. After reading Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls I’d follow T Kira anywhere.

She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

From the reporters who uncovered the truth about Harvey Weinstein, this investigative thriller gives me hope for future generations.

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone

The subtitle “the case for feminist revolution” says it all.

The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz

The 1950s Brady Bunch family is, and always has been, a myth. The traditional family model has never been the male breadwinner marriage. Reading this book changed everything I ever thought I knew about the modern family.

Down Girl by Kate Manne

That feeling that so many women have that if you don’t tow the line you’ll be punished? Not an accident. Kate Manne shows us why controlling and policing “bad” women is the engine that keeps society churning.

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

A novel about the twists and turns of whether the author Sheila Heti should have a child sounds grim, but someone she pulls it off--and offers a deeply felt view of womanhood along the way.

Like a Mother by Angela Garbes

Angela Garbes says the quiet part out loud, asking the questions we all think about but rarely get the chance to have answered.

What books would you add to the list?

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In community,

Ruthie

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The most recent on March 6th, asks a seemingly innocuous question in the headline: At What Point In My Career Should I Pause To Have Kids? But when I read that I immediately looked around me to see if anyone else noticed what the editors had done there, even though I was sitting alone in my bedroom. A few seconds later I shouted back at my screen: who says we have to pause our careers to become parents? Why are we still assuming we have to halt our lives for motherhood?

Some people pause their careers. Others don’t. Most don’t have that option at all. Why is it still a given in some circles that women have to choose between motherhood and work, between motherhood and creativity, between motherhood and their dreams? This all or nothing thinking is something I wrote about when my memoir was published last year. And guess what? It still enrages me.

We’re told everywhere we turn that women can’t be fully self-actualized humans and mothers. And yet, there are models all around us of women who have carved out their own paths and had children. My favorite book on the subject is an anthology called Revolutionary Mothering that spotlights how women of color have long understood the struggle for liberation and motherhood as intertwined.

“What would it mean to take the word “mother” less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation…?” the author Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks. As I wrote in The Mother Code, I jumped out of my chair when I read that. Yes, yes, yes, that’s the kind of motherhood I want. So, how did my image of what motherhood had to be get so far from my desired reality? Why in 2026 are we still wondering if women can lead full lives and be mothers too?

The second essay, On The Fence About Having Kids? Read This Book, includes a fascinating dive into the life of Merle Bombardieri, the author of the 1981 hit, The Baby Decision, and the essay’s author, Sanjena Sathian’s own journey to and through maternal ambivalence. But I also felt just plain sad. Fifteen years ago when I was an on-the-fencer trying to figure out my own “baby decision” I also read every book out there hoping someone (anyone!) could tell me whether I should become a mom. And yet here we are, all these years later, and it’s no easier to make that decision. If anything it’s harder. Roe has now been overturned. We still don’t have paid parental leave. Childcare is more expensive than ever. Our country is a disaster by every measure. And women are still reading the same books our mothers read–pushing the same boulders up the same hills for liberty and justice, something we were promised in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Not only that, but more and more MEN are talking about their own ambivalence. It’s actually not only women who suffer from being on-the-fencers — so many of us do. So, why aren’t we talking about ambivalence as a societal issue not just a women’s issue?

And then there’s He Changed His Mind, which spotlights a series of relationships where the woman doesn’t want children but her male partner, who originally agreed to be child-free, eventually decides he does want kids. Here’s a perfect example of men struggling with the choices around having a family! And let me tell you it’s not just men who change their minds about kids. Many of us do. In fact, in my Modern Love essay from 2019, I wrote about how I had done this exact thing in my first marriage. It’s difficult to decide what we want for our lives–and stick with it. We are constantly evolving and that’s the danger of love. We hope the other person changes with us, but that doesn’t always happen. And when we go in different directions, we have to make the painful decision to part ways. This isn’t a man or a woman problem. It’s the truth of relationships. Anytime two people try to meld their lives there will be puzzle pieces they thought fit together only to discover they no longer do.

I love that The Cut is focusing so much energy on parenthood, and I also wonder when I’ll finally read the essay about maternal joy. Or the one about that phantom-limb feeling that stays with you when you can’t be with your kid(s). Or that other one about the worthiness of a life with or without children. There’s so much to say that’s real and raw and honest and of the moment.

In Community,

Ruthie

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My Spring 8-Week Kickstarter is starting Tuesday, 3/24. This class is a perfect place to dive back into a writing project or start a new one. You’ll generate work using my tried and true exercises and prompts. It’s the perfect antidote to writer’s block. Only a few spots left. Save your spot.

The Fundamentals is a six-week group mentorship that shines a light on the black box of the book writing world and helps you get your book idea out of your head and onto the page. You’ll leave with a clear pathway to publishing and a sense of whether you have an idea that will sell. We’ll meet weekly starting Thursday, 4/2. Learn more.

The 6-month Book Builder program is a combo of both group workshops and individual sessions to keep you on track to complete a roadmap of your book and the first two to three chapters (or more!). My next cohort starts on May 13, 2026. Applications now open.

See All Upcoming Classes