INTERVIEW: Yael Goldstein Love by Abigail Stewart
The Possibilities
Yael Goldstein Love
Random House
Interview by
Abigail Stewart
Yael Goldstein-Love’s first novel Overture explores female ambition and the complicated relationship between mother and daughter. Her new novel, The Possibilities, explores similar themes of motherhood, but resonates with maternal love, a healthy dose of angst, and the wonders that exist in the hidden in-between.
The narrator, Hannah, is a mother who has recently experienced a difficult birth and almost lost her newborn son, Jack, in the aftermath. Over the following months, Hannah is plagued with worry about her son’s health and well-being, until, one day, she looks into the crib and finds him gone – her worst fears realized. Jack has slipped into a parallel reality and only Hannah can cross the multiverse to find him again.
As a reader, I am drawn to novels that deal with the feminine and the harsh realities and traumas of possessing a female body. So, I decided to meet with Goldstein-Love over a shared Google Doc to further discuss the effect of place on narrative, projective identification, and how motherhood shapes and reshapes the way women view themselves and the world around them.
Abigail Stewart: II’d like to dive in with a question about form – there’s a blending of genres that makes The Possibilities so interesting, it’s both literary and science fiction, as well as an intermingling of stories as Hannah travels between possibilities. How did you conceptualize the marriage of all these ideas? Did you find it difficult to formulate a structure?
Yael Goldstein-Love: You know, I think that complication came after the writing in some sense? It’s complicated from a marketing perspective – do you pitch this as sci-fi or literary? – but when I was writing, this felt like the only natural way to tell the story. I needed a sci-fi metaphor to capture the profound existential strangeness of becoming a new mother and the heightening of both fear and joy that went along with it. I didn’t worry too much about what genre I was writing in, only about how best to convey something I had never seen conveyed about motherhood.
The way I could see to do that was to make concrete what felt so true to me in those early months – that at the moment of birth the laws of nature briefly change so that parallel worlds not only exist side by side but can briefly affect each other. And also that the cosmic weight that this opens somehow fell entirely on me, the mother. When my son was a newborn, I sometimes felt like some ancient hero involved in an epic quest, only a very unsung one who from the outside would look to anyone else (and often myself) like the most boring being imaginable, an exhausted, unwashed mom. I really wanted to capture that dichotomy between how society sees the mother – boring – and the thrillingly life and death stakes of what we are actually engaged in.
AS: Hannah is forced to advocate for herself in the hospital, asking for a c-section as she feels something is wrong with the birth experience – and she turns out to be right. This moment cements the existence of a primal connection between herself and her son, Jack, however, there is also the sense of a narrowly avoided tragedy that permeates her being and echoes into the future. Do you feel the trauma of birth is something that should be depicted more in modern media?
YG-L: This is so beautifully put that I just want to stop a moment and appreciate it. “A sense of narrowly avoided tragedy that permeates her being.” I love that. Jack’s birth and near death mirrors my own son’s birth and near death pretty exactly, including my advocating for the c-section that saved his life. The narrowly avoided tragedy did permeate my being for a long time afterward – what I call in the book the “car-swerve feeling”, that sense that a disaster came too close to happening.
I had a doozy of a postpartum experience as a result of that birth. And because I knew nothing about traumatic birth or that it could give rise to posttraumatic stress symptoms, for months I existed in a bubble of pain and fear that kept me isolated from the rest of the living world. I had no idea how to explain to anyone else that even though I was home with a healthy newborn I didn’t totally trust that he was mine to keep and that every cough and snuffle felt like a clue I might need in order to save his life a second time.
We’ve gotten so much better at speaking about postpartum depression, but there’s such a wide range of postpartum experiences – it’s as variable as any other deep human experience. I wish our culture saw the transition to parenthood as the fascinating human experience it is and told as many stories about it as we do about, say, falling in love or going to war. Recently someone asked me if I was worried that the market for motherhood books wasn’t already “saturated”. Imagine someone asking that about novels that involve romantic love!
AS: There is much to be said about the disorientation of motherhood – how it changes one’s body, shifts one’s mindset, and reprioritizes everything. In Hannah’s case, this disorientation extends outward from her traumatic c-section to the disappearance of her son in a multiverse of possibilities. It’s almost as though the literal hole created in her manifests as a hole within the universe itself. She experiences both “Jacklessness” and “Jack-full” worlds as she searches for her son, and these are some of the most poignant emotional moments. Can you speak more about how the intense emotions and the shift in self, particularly in the time after giving birth, contribute to Hannah’s experience?
YG-L: Before having a child I understood that during pregnancy you lend your body to another person in order to let them come together physically. I did not understand until I had my son that once they’re born you start to lend your mind to them in the same way, to help them come together as a person. It’s such an intense and interesting experience, and it brings up so many previously hidden aspects of your own mind and past. Maybe in ways you can actually notice and name – that’s lucky, if so – or maybe you only feel these hidden aspects of yourself through confusing reactions you have to certain of your child’s behaviors or states. But either way, parenting stirs up all the sediment.
To me, that’s actually what the multiverse trope is all about, the hidden worlds upon worlds within ourselves, the expectations and patterns from our past experience that color our present in ways we often don’t recognize. Call it the unconscious or call it subcortical processing, call it whatever you want, but I think we all sense these hidden worlds working away within us, showing up in our patterns of thought and behavior. I think this is actually why we all resonate so much with multiverse stories. They have a feeling of uncanny rightness we can’t quite name. And that’s because they tell us something about our own experience that we kind of know and kind of don’t. I think a lot of moments in early parenthood have that same uncanny feeling running beneath.
AS: And a follow up to the above, did your own experience as a psychotherapist affect how you approached Hannah’s emotional state in the novel?
YG-L: So in my previous answer I was studiously avoiding using descriptions like “primary maternal preoccupation” – D.W. Winnicott’s term for lending your whole self to the project of bringing together your child’s mind. And I certainly avoid using any jargon or introducing psychological concepts in the book, where I focus entirely on Hannah’s raw experience and shaping that into an exciting story. But having access to over a century of psychological insight about how the intimacy between a mother and child works – not to mention seeing it play out in so many different ways in my clinical work – was invaluable to me in figuring out how to make the plot hang together.
For instance, I could never have landed the ending without the concept of projective identification. It’s a term that (annoyingly) has several different meanings in the psychoanalytic literature, but among these is the idea (originally from Melanie Klein, and further developed by Wilfred Bion) that the way in which an infant communicates is by eliciting feelings in its caregivers. The infant has no words, no concepts even. But sometimes it feels awful, terrified, like the world is ending, and so it cries. Now the mother or father feels briefly awful, terrified, like the world is ending, especially if they were just yanked out of sleep. But because they have adult minds to bring to bear on their feelings they can quickly tame their emotion into, “Oh, she’s hungry” or, “Oh, he’s cold” and address the situation, bringing the infant back to a state of contentment. In this way, the infant learns that its states have meaning – e.g. hunger, cold. It’s the beginning of thought, of having a mind, and it happens in relationship.
It’s an amazing process, but it can also be such an intense one for the caregiver since you’re being made to feel these very primitive states of unformed “gaahh!!!” And that can affect you very differently depending on your own experience of being cared for, your own tolerance for uncertainty, your own current life circumstances and state of sleeplessness, and so much else.
I am pretty sure that this book is the first novel to (intentionally) turn projective identification into a sci-fi scene. Although I haven’t done an exhaustive search or anything so who knows.
AS: The details in the novel certainly ground you in a sense of place – and as a fellow Berkeley resident, I appreciated many of the references. Was setting the story in California of any particular significance or importance to you?
YG-L: I wrote The Possibilities during a period of great homesickness for the Bay Area. You could say that the whole book arose out of that homesickness. I had just moved from Berkeley to Washington D.C. with my infant and partner, and I spent my days imagining being back on the familiar streets where I had wheeled my newborn, had deep community, and felt I still made some sense to myself. I was disoriented and dislocated – first by motherhood, and then by the move and the almost immediate unraveling of my partnership.
One day, I was standing outside our building, trying to understand how to manage a complicated puzzle that involved a car key I’d mistakenly left inside, a giant baby who would definitely lose his cool if I tried to take him out of his stroller and up the stairs, and an important appointment. I convinced myself for a split second that maybe I should just run into the apartment without my son, leave him right there on the street, because honestly what were the odds that someone would take him in the two minutes I’d be gone? As I was thinking this, I looked at his little face and he cracked this wide, trusting smile, and I suddenly had the most vivid, frightening image: What if I actually had started up the stairs alone and then had turned around seconds later and he was gone? In my terrifying fantasy, my son had disappeared from D.C. and reappeared instantaneously back at our home in Berkeley, where I longed for us both to be. He was there, I was here, and how would I get to him, how would I help him?
That was the first spark for this novel. In the book, the baby, Jack, doesn’t slip between geographic locations, but rather between parallel realities, one in which he had lived and one in which he had died during his birth. But that longing for the Bay Area still infuses the book, which is why place functions almost like another character.
AS: At one point, toward the end of the novel, Hannah wonders if her own mother was a “saint” or a “monster.” I found this dichotomy particularly poignant in evaluating one’s own mother, and women in general, as women are often viewed in a binary. How do you feel The Possibilities addresses the multifaceted, lived experience of womanhood / motherhood?
YG-L: Gosh, this is such a good question and I feel I need 100 pages to address it. It’s such a tragedy that we think of motherhood as some monolithic experience when it is as infinitely varied as the humans that experience it. It’s a relationship – a deeply complex relationship – and so not only is every mother going to experience it differently, she’ll experience it differently with each child. We do mothers such a disservice when we don’t acknowledge this, and instead make them think there’s some way they should be having this experience.
I know I keep harping on the comparison with romance, but imagine if every time someone fell in love they tried to compare their experience to how everyone else experienced romantic love and gauging if they were doing it “right”. It would be absurd, and it would also kill the magic of being in love. And it’s really the same for motherhood. I think the pull to make this experience monolithic has something deeply sexist in it. It’s a way of dismissing the full humanity of mothers.
And by the same token it’s a way of dismissing the full humanity of women, because the binary extends so that somehow for women there are two primary states: a woman who has children and a woman who doesn’t. As though the most important fact about a woman’s life is whether or not she reproduced. It certainly can be, but it can also so easily not be. Imagine thinking the most important thing about, say, Iris Murdoch’s life was that she didn’t have children!
AS: Finally, I wanted to congratulate you on your book release and a brilliantly crafted novel. Are you working on anything new now?
YG-L: Thank you so much. Both for the kind words and for these wonderful questions. Engaging with someone else’s interesting thoughts and reactions like this is really the best part of publishing a book, so I deeply appreciate it. I far prefer writing books to releasing them, and I’m always in the middle of writing a new novel. I wouldn’t know where to put my thoughts otherwise. The new one also blends the genres of literary and sci-fi – it turns out, I think, that my internal world just blends these genres? – and is about single motherhood and the connection between sex and loneliness.
