Yael Goldstein-Love on the Impossibilities Captured in The Possibilities
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Yael Goldstein-Love discusses her time- and genre-bending novel, The Possibilities, trying to put motherhood into words, using quantum mechanics to explain the paradox of parenthood, the way parents birth a child’s mind, mom rage, writing humor, her newest project, and more!
From the episode:
Yael Goldstein-Love: [Quantum mechanics] was a very natural metaphor for me to use. [One] thing that was really important to me in writing this book was capturing–in a way that I had not seen captured elsewhere–the incredibly unique form of communication that passes between an infant and a caregiver, and that continues to pass between a caregiver and child even when there’s verbal back and forth. That communication that really is just riding the same vibration.
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Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, a speculative thriller about the psychological transition to motherhood. A PEOPLE pick of the week (“a powerful page-turner with deep wisdom”) and Good Morning America recommendation for summer reading (“taps into those primal feelings every nurturer feels — and fears”), The Possibilities grew out of Goldstein-Love’s own rocky transition to motherhood as well as her clinical passion for working with people during this fraught and potentially generative period. Her doctoral dissertation examined how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children.
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Slate, among other places. A graduate of Harvard University and The Wright Institute, she lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA.
In another life, she was co-founder and Editorial Director of the literary studio Plympton, which aims to make the digital age a golden age for literature.
