Yael Goldstein-Love

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky and the co-founder of the literary studio Plympton. She also practices psychotherapy with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. She lives with her son in Berkeley, California.

Goldstein-Love's new novel is The Possibilities.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The book was originally called A Reasonable Woman to get at the dilemma that motherhood puts women in. You’re supposed to be instinctual but also rational, trust your gut but not be anxious. But while that title got at the psychological realism of the book, it hid that this is also a sci-fi thriller.

Then the book was called Hannah42 because my main character teams up a version of herself from another reality who calls herself Hannah42 in a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. She feels that calling herself Hannah1 would be presumptuous given the infinite versions of herself she now knows to exist. This title had the opposite problem– it made the book sound like hard core sci-fi instead of a book that uses sci-fi as a metaphor to explore motherhood.

The Possibilities finally struck the right balance. My main character “rides the possibilities” – travels to other possible worlds – in order to save her son, and this is both the actual plot of the book and also a way of capturing what becoming a mother feels like.

What's in a name?

I chose the name Hannah for my protagonist because it’s a palindrome. To say why this matters would be a bit of a spoiler. It’s also the name of the prophet Samuel’s mother, and I’ve always read the short snippet we get of her in the bible as a really excellent metaphor for something deep about parenting. In order to have her child, she first has to surrender her claim to him.

All the names in the book have meaning, but the most important name in the book to me was the one that derives its rightness from an almost anti-meaning: the baby is named Jack. The simplicity and familiarity of the name captures for me something so unexpectedly bizarre about having a child, which is that here they are, this particular person, where before they were not. Here is Jack. Why is he here rather than someone else? No reason, he just is. In the book, the word Jacklessness becomes important and there is really no other name that can do the work that Jack does there.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

So surprised, but the book wouldn’t exist otherwise. One thing the book is about is how having a child creates a disorienting sense of discontinuity with your past self so that it almost seems as though all your memories belong to someone very close to you who is not exactly you anymore. And at the same time, your past has never been more in play – caring for a newborn brings up so much that can otherwise stay hidden in deep recesses of our minds, hidden scripts and patterns, expectations that color our experience of the world. So I think my teenage self would read this and feel that a total stranger had exposed her in ways she could not quite name, but that still felt a bit violating.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Every character I write is formed out of some piece of my psyche. I see myself in every one of them. They each take very different aspects of me and develop them in very different directions.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I also practice psychotherapy and was getting my doctorate in clinical psychology while writing this book. I think my other career was a crucial ingredient because this book is so personal. It grew out of the hardest period of my life, almost losing my son in childbirth and then feeling that he’d come too close to dying for him to truly be safe now. On the first draft, I was writing to make sense and meaning of my own experience. If I didn’t spend my days immersed in other peoples’ attempts to make meaning of their transitions to parenthood, I wouldn’t have understood the more universal elements of what I was writing about. I suspect I would not have had the gumption to write the book as ambitiously as I did, taking a part of life that usually gets written about as quiet and domestic and writing it instead with rip-through-reality loudness – new motherhood as hero quest.

Visit Yael Goldstein-Love's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Possibilities.

--Marshal Zeringue