When Moms Try Wrong

"I think most of all, they're scared."

Every novel, to some extent, is about mothers, because every book, to some extent, is about family. Whether it’s chosen family or family of origin, you can’t really conceive of a character unless you reckon with the impact of the people surrounding that character.

Lynn Steger Strong

’s fiction always dives deep into the heart of what draws people together, what tears them apart, and how the push and pull of love, obligation, guilt, and dependance form a person.

I read Lynn’s latest, The Float Test a couple months ago while in Florida visiting family, which was an ideal context (Florida is certainly one of the book’s main characters). When I finished it on the plane ride home, I shed a few of those very specific end-of-book-poignant tears and immediately tried to do the impossible and communicate to Brett what made the book so ineffably beautiful. The Float Test is a positively redolent read that will upend everything you thought you knew about Florida, Chekov’s gun, and the hunger of vultures.

I can’t stop thinking about the many mothers in the book. They all love their children, they all try, and they all fail. And I can’t wait to share my conversation with Lynn about bodies, control, care, and the complicated nature of “keeping our kids safe.”

Can we talk about control as it pertains to mothers? The hyperindividualistic mamasphere promises consumers that a good life (and a comfortable, satisfying experience of motherhood) can all be attained by exercising control. Over our bodies/our children’s bodies; our food/our children’s food; our environments/our children’s environments. It’s unfortunately even more relevant in our cursed era of MAHA, but mothers have ALWAYS been held to abusive standards of control when it comes to the “outcome” of our mothering efforts. And I think the mothers in The Float Test embody this fallacy to varying extents.

A thing I think about a lot when I’m moving through a book is ideas that feel, on the surface, acceptable, correct, something someone might put on a pillow or a poster, but then when you nose around inside of them, when you follow them out to the furthest consequence, you see how dangerous, destructive, sometimes terrifying they can also be.

With regard to mothers and control, I think a lot about fear and safety; how, in the name of keeping the children safe, a lot of incredible harm can be caused. It is good and important to keep our children safe, and also, the responsibility and fear we feel around it, the sense that we’re not always sure how to do it best, can be twisted and manipulated to other people’s ends. Think of book bans. Think of anorexic mothers (but honey, if you’re fat, people won’t be nice, you won’t be loved, successful). The matriarch in this book has been not so quietly communicating these things to her daughters their whole lives, and I think, truly, she thinks it’s necessary information; it’s information she was given, and she’s clung to it for survival her whole life. Think of all the ways people cordon their children off from other people and what that teaches those children about generosity and care.

With regard to food specifically, the first time I put our 6-week-old on a scale and the pediatrician congratulated me for being “such a great cow” the combination of disgust and pride I felt was like nothing in my life so far. Nursing is such an endlessly rich metaphor for so much about motherhood specifically: you have to give of your body to keep your child alive; you can get high from it; it can also cause you great pain, wear you out. We’re taught, through that process, people looking at you sideways (real or imagined) when you pull out a bottle, people congratulating (and then judging) you for whipping a boob out for your 18-month-old. All of this seems to still feel alive even after your child is eating solids. Again, it starts from power: we make food! How cool! But then it gets twisted into something so much spikier: our children are relying on us to provide the right and best food; it has to be perfect, pure.

Every mother in this novel WANTS, I think, desperately to be a good mother (I think every mother I have ever met wants that). But their sense of how that might be accomplished is so broken, clouded by societal expectations, by damage from their own mothers, by their mothers’ mothers, those mothers’ mothers and on and on. They don’t have enough friends or models; they all lack access to broader communities. I think most of all they’re scared.

Motherhood also seems like a way for some characters to evade difficult conversations with themselves, right? Which I so relate to! In many ways, I became pregnant with my first child as a way to avoid the “what the fuck do I do with my life and what the fuck do I want from my life” question, and even the choice to have my third child was colored by a fear of “now that I’m done having kids, now what….”

I think this also very much has to do with power. It has to do with spaces where we feel allowed to exert subjectivity, spaces where we’re celebrated for making choices, being active, taking up space in the world. I remember viscerally the first time I was legible to other people as “mother.” I was pregnant, on the subway; a woman got up for me to sit and I was so confused and then thought, ah, okay, I’m that person now.

As much as being mother can negate other aspects of us–are we allowed to be mother and also artist? Are we allowed to be mothers and also selfish, sexual, desperate, angry, on and on–inhabiting the role of mother also makes us make sense. No one asks you to account for how you spend your time, your worth or value. You are mother and so you are both easily dismissable for a certain type of person, but also productive enough that people give you a sort of distant respect.

As someone who often struggled in my twenties to feel legible to people; I was always too messy, too abrasive, too intense, bare-faced and thoughtlessly dressed; I was supposed to be smart, except I couldn’t focus or produce anything of value, so much lost potential, on and on. There was a real relief to me in just giving over to this idea of finally making sense to people–oh! It’s because she’s a mom!--even if it was just another different way they were getting me wrong.

I think all the women in this book are (to different degrees) both deeply attracted to and repelled by what this idea of inhabiting the word mother provides for or might somehow make less immediately available to them. I think Fred and Jude’s mom especially really struggles with the ways that role doesn’t suit her or play to her strengths as much as other roles she plays in other people’s lives do and can.

The dads in this book are FASCINATING. Our patriarch is (in many ways) a shell of himself and incapable of taking care of himself once his wife dies, and none of his kids even toy with the idea of him ever being able to learn. Poor George feels utterly unmoored when his potential roles as Husband, Provider, and Father are ripped away from him. And Jenn’s husband (father of a jillion lol) is more or less a nonentity. Maeve’s daughter’s father is an actual nonentity. How did you think about fathers in relation to mothers as you wrote the book?

Like the women, I thought of them largely on a spectrum of capability, culpability; but also, much like the women, beholden to a worldview that makes it difficult for them to have much agency or even knowledge in how they came to inhabit the roles they’re now stuck with. Jenn’s husband, to me, is absent on purpose. She is so in control by her own design (but also I think because she’s scared). She is all (partially a performance of) power and agency and muscling her way through the word mother; there’s not really space for her husband to provide much care for their kids. I think the dad is similar. He’s almost comically helpless and that is absolutely his fault, but it’s also the fault of the systems and structures that made it possible for him to not ever have to learn to care for himself.

It was important to me, in this vein, to have Brian, who is actually a more competent, loving and attentive parent than his wife. Not because I think his wife is a bad mom. I don’t. I’m married to a person who is significantly better at domestic labor than I am. But because I think it can also prove tricky when a man out-performs his wife in these roles and I wanted to come at these ideas from that angle as well.

The character of Ellen crushed me, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads the book, but I want to avoid spoilers. I guess I can say that she becomes a mother as a technical adult who is still more or less a child, and the identity of motherhood (in many ways) saves her life, right? When Fred (who I’d argue is the protagonist) sees her old high school acquaintance as an adult, she’s really struck by Ellen’s general mom vibes: “Ellen looked so much like a mom now, the way she moved briskly, the crisp, soft blue of her sleeveless shirt. Her skin shone, taut.” In many ways, Ellen is the mom-est mom in the book!

I love this idea and a hundred percent agree. Ellen was at first a much smaller character, and, as you say, a very mom-like mom. And then I, too, became obsessed with her.

I think this comes back to your initial question about control in motherhood: Ellen has lived a life in which she has had very little power or agency: she lost her own mother, she married a very controlling man when she was very young. She is good at caring for other people because life has forced her to learn to be good at caring for other people, and/but, because she is good at caring for other people, it also makes her feel powerful when she gets to do it for her kid.

She loves being a mother, and I wanted to let at least one character in the book love being a mother without having to constantly feel weird or bad about it, because I also think, especially for people who have had to play parent to people who don’t deserve it, bad partners, stunted parents, etc, there is a sort of pleasure and relief in getting to give that same devotion to one’s children, that feeling of, aha, this makes sense for this small helpless being, and also, if I do this job well, they won’t always need me; they will be able to care for others one day, unlike the grownups who maybe asked you to parent them. Of course also see above for all the ways that doesn’t mean this isn’t tricky, complicated too.

I think, too, I’m always interested in asking readers to inhabit archetypes and expectations, and then sort of flipping and twisting them. Ellen is, in many ways, at the moment Fred first meets her, exactly what she looks like, a wealthy, well-dressed, house-obsessed stay-at-home Florida mom, and also, I think every one of us is more than whatever we seem like at first glance. I wanted to ask the reader to both take her at face value, and then also to interrogate all the various layers that might still be roiling under the surface of all and any of us.

I was really interested in how you approached food and bodies and restriction in the book. The matriarch of the Kenner family raises all of her children with unarguably toxic ideas about food and how bodies supposedly represent inner goodness. The way you portray this is chilling, maybe all the more so because the eating disorders and habits of disordered eating are all dealt with so matter-of-factly. Some people, of course, are raised to view their bodies as unruly things to control, and when that is bound up with the idea of “maternal love” it’s beyond complicated and devastating. I’m thinking specifically of the way Deborah diligently packs each of her children’s school lunches every single day: big, fat sandwiches, bags of chips, sweet granola bars, bottles of juice. And yet she demands thinness at all costs and all of her children understand that their school lunches are meant to communicate her maternal love but that they’re never to eat them. It’s fucked! Lol.

Lol, and then feel a little sick I think?

Food, man. I think it’s endlessly useful in fiction, endlessly complicated and complicating in life, particularly, again, if you are a woman and also if you are a mom. Food has not ever, for me, been just food. It’s love, it’s sustenance, it’s torture, it’s a thing we offer other people; it’s a thing we can deny ourselves and sometimes convince ourselves that that denial feels like power. It’s an assertion of desire, a willingness to take up space, a way to reach out to other people, an act of love and care. I think Deborah truly, absolutely wants to love her children; she wants to care for, cook for, give to her children, and also she doesn’t really know how.

I think as often as possible it’s my job to make feelings and ideas alive and legible to the reader, and food, nursing, cooking is an endlessly useful space to show all the ways we give, withhold, manipulate, try. To me those lunches are real and true attempts at love by the mother. The fact that the children know better than to eat them are a result of other different acts the mother has also made that makes it difficult for the children to feel their mother’s love even if and when she tries to offer it. So often, we act, and want those actions to happen in a vacuum, to stand on their own, but, especially in families, actions accrue, and are informed by all the actions, judgments, comments that we made leading up.

I’d love to talk a little about running culture. I’m a casual jogger. I did one half-marathon and I guess I liked the challenge of training or whatever, but my digestion was not happy (something I never knew was a THING!) and I have zero desire to ever push myself to that extent again. My sweet spot is 3 chill miles and a podcast - ha. But wow, does Fred run. I’m struck by the line between running as an emotionally healthy release and physical activity and running as self-punishment and self-annihilation. So often, Fred seems to be quite literally running from herself until she’s so physically depleted she’s unburdened from selfhood. I know you’re a runner, so I’d love your thoughts!

My thoughts are: that is correct, self-annihilation and depletion is the goal 🙂.

I think, and I think this is connected to all of your questions, this also comes back to how often women enact their most furious, most exacting acts of subjectivity inward instead of outward, both inside their domestic spaces and physically in and on themselves. I think for Fred (and also for me) running is so perfectly addictive because it makes her feel powerful (and there’s that word again). She’s fast. She’s strong. She’s entered middle age and is still gutting through these intense workouts. She’s compulsive and not always great at regulating her compulsions and the ways that running yourself ragged (both in running for Fred and with all the kids for Jenn) can sort of just deplete you to the point where you finally have to stop, can feel calm and quiet, emptied out, even for a second, is a high a lot of the women in this book are trying to catch.

Fred has spent most of her life not knowing how to feel powerful or strong if there’s not pain attached to it. She doesn’t know how to let herself be in her body if being in her body doesn’t also hurt. But, I also think she is trying actively in the novel to feel not just pain but pleasure, hence the floating, also, sex. She knows that line between power and annihilation is slippery and complicated and she’s trying to touch and better understand it, but it’s hard. I think long after we recognize intellectually a pattern or a practice is a problem–or, at least, not always healthy–especially when it’s embodied, it’s still difficult to extract ourselves from yearning for it.

And so Fred is trying to swim and float, to also be still and steady, but so much of the time the only way she can get to those moments is through running herself pretty aggressively into the ground.

Florida! (Imagine me singing the Taylor Swift song). As a New Englander, this book really made me understand HOW VERY LITTLE we northeasterners know about the American south, but particularly Florida, a state many of us associate with Disney, scary politics, sad housing developments, and family vacations to visit older family members. And not much else! Was rewriting Florida on your own terms a deliberate goal in this book? I really loved getting to know the state through your eyes.

It’s the place I’m from and I do truly love it so much. And also I hate how willfully it’s being destroyed. There’s no place on earth like it. I hate how a handful of bad actors, memes, and stories, tax policies and politicians have reduced this rich and complicated state down to a handful of some of its least appealing parts. I can’t be in Florida anymore without having this intense sense that it is the front lines of so much of the climate catastrophe in front of us.

To me, fiction is at its best when it’s embodied, textural, when you can touch and taste and feel the characters’ experience in your bones and on your skin. There’s no place I feel as completely as Florida, especially in summer, the particular weight and density of the heat, the thunder storms, the ocean; the way your skin prickles and then stiffens from a sunburn, the way water feels different, essential, all-consuming after a hot two-hour run. It’s so violent and extreme and beautiful. When I was a kid, I saw alligators snap at herons (and sometimes eat them) in the swamp next to the street on my runs; lizards would squirm past me and over my feet; I rode horses when I was in elementary and middle school and we’d race them through knee-deep swamps and more than once their horseshoes were sucked off by the density of the mud. I hadn’t before this felt like a good enough writer to get it as right as I knew I’d want to. The strangeness and the languor and the sweat. It had begun to feel so important to me to capture what I know and love about it as more and more of the wildlife is destroyed, as hurricanes become more and more intense.

You’ve mentioned that The Float Test is particularly near and dear to you, and as a reader, I really felt that in the reading experience.

I felt writing this book both the most cracked open, and not because I was writing about myself, but because I felt like I was writing from the mushiest, most scared, but also angriest, most desperate parts of myself, and also that I finally felt like I had the chops to pull it off. Florida, and these people, are more extreme than characters I’ve written before. They are not well-intentioned all the time; they are selfish; they can be cruel; they have caused real destruction and hurt. But also, I think they are people, worthy of love, attention, dignity, respect. I do not ever want my characters to feel like cartoons, like they are villains or victims. It felt important to me that I feel capable of inhabiting all of these extremes but dexterously, carefully, precisely, humanely, in order to maintain their rounded aliveness.

I have this theory that with each book you get a little stronger, a little braver, and therefore, each book is jumping off a higher cliff. This one felt like scaling something much steeper, more jagged, vertiginously terrifying. It felt like the only way to land it was to also imbue it with as much attention, care, and (and please know it makes me cringe to say this but it’s the only word that suits here) but as much love as I could.