how novelist and psychotherapist Yael Goldstein-Love uses her characters' psychology as a portal into writing

bringing the rich sensory experience of early motherhood into writing, plus nursing and let-down as "a kind of cosmic compass"

Today I’m excited to share another interview in the new tending section, which will be a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. I’m experimenting with an interview + exercise format, so below you’ll find just one interview question, then a fun exercise related to that question.

Today’s interview is with Yael Goldstein-Love, whose new novel The Possibilities is “a speculative thriller about the psychological experience of becoming a new mother.” (I’ve been calling it early motherhood meets the multiverse!) It just got a great review in the New York Times, which called it “a beautiful, exciting book… headspinning.” (!!!) You can find Yael on instagram at @yaelgoldsteinlovewrites and read more at her website.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so if you have a good idea, feel free to let me know.

And a fun programming note: novelist Erin Flanagan and I are hosting a zoom planning party this Sunday, August 27 from 3-4pm eastern, and we’d love for you to join us. Whether the approach of fall fills you with glee or dread, we have so many good ideas to help you organize your calendar and plan out your writing life. You can get the link by registering here, and you can read all the info right below.

it's a 🎉planning party🎉 and you're invited! Sunday, August 27, 3-4pm eastern on zoom

I first found Yael through a piece she wrote for Slate, In Defense of the Anxious Mother, about the “mismatch between the primal maternal drive to protect our offspring and our knowledge that we’re largely powerless to do so,” and when I read the premise of her new novel—a mother has to learn to travel the multiverse to retrieve her missing son—I was instantly in.

The Possibilities (Random House, 2023) is a speculative thriller about the psychological experience of becoming a new mother. A PEOPLE pick of the week (“A powerful page-turner with deep wisdom”) and a Good Morning America recommendation for summer reading (“Taps into those primal feelings every nurturer feels -- and fears”), the book grew out of Goldstein-Love's own rocky transition to motherhood, as well as her clinical experience working as a psychotherapist and psychological researcher with postpartum mothers. She is also the author of the novel Overture/The Passion of Tasha Darsky (Doubleday). She lives with her six-year-old son in Berkeley, CA. 

Below, we talk about “natural entry points” for fiction writers, and how probing her characters’ psychology led her back to rich sensory description.

Yael Goldstein-Love; 📸Laura Turbow Photography

one question for Yael Goldstein-Love

I’d thought I’d want to ask you about how you brought the science into the book and how you conceived of this idea of early motherhood and the multiverse, but then a) you wrote a really great piece on “elegantly weaving science into fiction” for Lit Hub and b) I found myself really taken with a different aspect of the book–the incredible sensory details that really captured the bodily experience of life with a small baby. I felt like, reading the descriptions of Jack and of Hannah thinking about Jack, I was also really re-experiencing my own first months of motherhood. To give an example from very early in the book: 

I smiled at him, and then, unable to resist, though I knew it would perk him up and make a car seat nap less likely, I bent and nuzzled the top of his small head. The silky brown waves that tightened into ringlets near the base of his neck smelled of absurdly expensive baby shampoo mixed with a musky like a cat’s just-licked fur. The smell soothed my nerve endings like nicotine.

There’s just so much richness in that description–it’s visual, but it also has these really tactile details, and the precision about the sense, plus this real attunement the mother has to her child–knowing that the physical contact will perk the kid back up! It’s the kind of detail that’s really present for you when you’re caring for a baby day to day, but can be really hard to get down in writing later. And, of course, when you’re actually doing that intense, daily caregiving for a baby, it’s so hard to find the time and brainpower to record those details in writing. 

So that’s my question, really: how did you capture that babyness, and the physical experience of the connection a caregiver has with a baby so precisely?

Yael

Wow, thank you. This question makes me so happy. You’ve taken one of my goals for the book and stated it so beautifully. Getting those sensory details right felt absolutely crucial not just because they’re so unique to early motherhood, but also because they stir up so much psychological sediment in us. Breastmilk and spit up and soiled diapers and soft baby skin pressed against our own tired flesh – they’re all part of an intense bodily intimacy that most of us haven’t experienced since we were the babies being taken care of by our mothers. Reliving that can’t help but tap into procedural memories so early they’re preverbal - memories that help form the bedrock of how we experience ourselves, the world, our place within it – and that adds so much extra intensity to the experience of new motherhood. 

That’s also why it felt so important to me to keep the speculative aspects of the book firmly rooted in Hannah’s body. So, for instance, her milk let-down turning out to function as a kind of cosmic compass. Or even the way her sleeplessness initially helps unleash her strange abilities. 

Your question also makes me happy because I don’t think of sensory detail as my strongest suit. I think every fiction writer has their one most natural entry point for imagining the worlds of their books. For some it’s sociological – the external forces at work on their characters – for some it’s visual, some sensory, some more conceptual, about the ideas. For me it’s always been psychological. Not to say these different aspects ever come entirely apart, and I think a good novelist is always approaching the world of their book with each of these in mind. But, again, it’s about that natural point of entry. And, for me, it’s always the psychological interior that yields most easily to my imagination. 

I worm my way in there and palpate the texture of conflicting feelings and urges, of strange passing thoughts and images that surprise both the character and me, and I wonder why. It’s in trying to figure out why my characters are having these internal experiences – why really, why deeply – that I can feel my way into the other aspects of these imagined worlds, including the sensory. 

One example of how this worked: In an early scene I have Hannah sitting and nursing her son after the terrifying experience of thinking, for many minutes, that he’s gone missing from a public space – and then ultimately finding him in exactly the spot where she initially left him, but where she is absolutely certain he had not been moments earlier. When I imagined Hannah feeding Jack in the aftermath of this incident, I could feel a confusing mix of relief and reluctance in her, a strange mingling of a desire to give herself over entirely to this beloved child and a pinched self-protection. I wanted to understand better what was going on for her right here, right now to stir up such a complicated mix of conflicting feelings when I’d have initially guessed all she’d feel was simple relief to have him safely in her arms. 

The question led me back to sensory details I’d forgotten about breastfeeding – a certain painful tickly flutter at let-down that would sometimes fill me with a brief flare of utterly mysterious and directionless anger; also an occasional sense of being both filled up and devoured so that breastfeeding could be both perfectly cozy and like body horror at the exact same moment.  

if you’d like to try it out . . .

Start with imagining a moment where your character believes they want one thing, but finds themselves acting in a way that seems designed to thwart that aim. It can be big or small – a marriage proposal, a job promotion, the good regard of someone they just ran into at a party, a salad for lunch. The character shouldn’t necessarily be aware of the contradiction between what they believe they want and how they are behaving  – only you need to be. Now try to bring this internal conflict to life on the page without explaining it or spelling it out. Just make us feel it by using sensory detail to bring us into the conflicted moment for this character.

If you’d like to hear Yael talk more about her book, she’s been on some great podcasts lately, including Good Moms on Paper and Turn the Page. You can buy The Possibilities from Bookshop, from your local indie, or anywhere else books are sold.

And! A special note from Yael, for anyone who lives in California: if you’re looking for a therapist, I *believe* I'll be taking on new clients for my private practice starting this fall. You can reach out through my website to inquire. Although I enjoy working with a broad range of adults, my two specialties happen to be working with new parents and working with artists. 

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram. 

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