Writing While Becoming Two: How Motherhood Influenced My Debut Novel

For the four years I spent writing and editing my debut novel, I was preoccupied with one question: what would it mean to share a mind? To feel another’s hunger as your own, to carry their fears inside your chest, to think in two voices at once.

I thought I was inventing something impossible, testing the limits of intimacy, imagining a future where two selves might fuse. Then I became a mother, and realized I already had.

As implausible as it may seem, there’s nothing speculative about sharing your body, about turning from I to we. If you think about it, it’s the most ordinary miracle there is, one lived by hundreds of millions each year. Motherhood does exactly that. It redraws the boundaries until you no longer know where you end and someone else begins.

In The Merge, a mother and daughter fuse their consciousnesses in a desperate attempt to save the mother from Alzheimer’s; an act of love that blurs the line between care and surrender. I wrote the book before I was pregnant, edited it while carrying my daughter, and now it’s going out into the world as I navigate life with her in my arms. Each stage has felt like a different way of understanding the same idea: how two beings can coexist within one life, shifting shape around each other. The story I once imagined as speculative fiction has followed me through a merging of my own.

Motherhood has made me newly aware of how porous we are, how the borders between lives can blur until we begin to carry pieces of each other.

During the first drafts, The Merge was abstract, a thought experiment about humanity, identity and control. By the time I was editing, with another heartbeat inside me, the concept had become literal. Editing while carrying her was harder than I expected. My concentration splintered; sentences that once came easily slipped away mid-thought. I’d sit for hours, tired in a way that reached the bones, feeling her move as I tried to focus. It was the first time I understood what it meant to share your body completely. The quiet, continual giving of yourself to sustain someone else.

The story hadn’t altered, but my understanding had. What I’d once written as sacrifice now felt embodied, something known from the inside out. The small, invisible acts of giving that love requires, and the strange, fierce joy that can exist inside that giving. There was something quietly extraordinary about that timing, about a story I’d once imagined finding new meaning through the very experience it seemed to foreshadow.

The early weeks of motherhood existed in a kind of suspended time. Days folded into each other, marked not by clocks but by cycles of feeding, sleeping, and rocking. Though we no longer shared a body, it still felt as if we were one being, our rhythms entwined, her needs dictating the shape of every day and night. I would feel her hunger before she cried, her calm settle into me as if it were my own. Every feeling, every moment, seemed to pass through us both. The separation was physical, but in every other sense, the merging continued.

What I’ve learned over the past six months of becoming hers is that there’s beauty in the dissolving, in the slow reassembling of self around someone else. To be so needed is overwhelming and luminous all at once.

There are days when it’s hard to hold so much. The giving never really stops; it only changes shape. Some days, it feels like I have nothing left to give. Time measured in needs. Hers, mine, ours. Some nights, she wakes not because she’s hungry, but because she wants to be close. I lift her against my chest and feel her whole body settle. The small sigh, the soft weight of trust. I’m tired—often exhausted—but there’s a strange kind of peace in it, a deep rightness. In the dark, it’s just the two of us, suspended between weariness and wonder, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

When she cries, it reverberates through me as if my body still belongs to her. My pulse quickens before my mind can reason; the instinct to soothe is immediate, total. Her distress feels cellular, mine even when it isn’t. The echo of pregnancy lingers, that wordless communication between our bodies that hasn’t quite faded. She cries, and I feel it everywhere.

Every day, the boundaries between us blur, not in the dramatic sense I once imagined, but in the steady, everyday way love expands a life. Two lives, two minds, combining. It’s the idea that shaped my writing, and now, in a quieter way, my days.

Motherhood has made me newly aware of how porous we are, how the borders between lives can blur until we begin to carry pieces of each other.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived in other people’s stories—first as a reader, then as a writer—learning how it feels to let someone else’s thoughts shape your own. As a child, I would lose hours inside books, emerging slightly altered each time, unsure where their world ended and mine began. Reading and writing are both acts of surrender: you step inside someone else’s mind until their thoughts begin to color your own; you carry them long after you’ve left the page.

Writing taught me how to imagine connection. Motherhood is teaching me how to live it. Both are acts of merging.

Motherhood feels like that too, but without metaphor. The most complete version of it. It asks for the same openness, the same surrender. To love someone so entirely, whether in language or in life, is to give yourself over without condition, to let their joy and fear and need move through you as if they were your own.

I’ve always understood identity as something fluid. Changeable, elastic, shaped by what and who we love. But motherhood has made that truth physical. It’s no longer an idea but a sensation: the give and take of bodies, the constant motion between self and other. In The Merge, the mother and daughter become a study in identity; what happens when love blurs the self beyond recognition. As their minds merge, each begins to absorb traces of the other, reshaped by a bond that both saves and transforms them. The merging I once imagined on the page now feels like something my body already knew, that to love without boundary isn’t to lose yourself, but to live more widely within the world.

Now, as my book prepares to enter the world, I feel a different kind of merging, one of creation and release. The Merge no longer belongs only to me; it will find new life in other people’s minds, shifting and reshaping itself in ways I can’t control. It’s the same lesson motherhood will teach me: that you create, you nurture, and then you let go.

Both my daughter and my novel began within me, but neither are mine to keep. And maybe that’s what all forms of love demand, the courage to loosen your grip. To trust that what you’ve made will carry some trace of you, even as it becomes its own thing entirely.

Writing taught me how to imagine connection. Motherhood is teaching me how to live it. Both are acts of merging, and both, in their own ways, have made me whole.

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The Merge by Grace Walker is available from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.