As a follow-up to last week’s post on the reading lives of mothers, I am posting my full interview with Ashlee Laielli of the Instagram account books_before_dishes. Laielli’s introspective responses resonated with me, and I’m excited to share them with readers. Thanks, Lee!
Since becoming a parent, what are some shifts you’ve noticed in your reading habits?
I read more. I’ve learned to set aside books that leave me stuck in a rut and keep trying new things until I catch myself unable to put something down. There are books I have no trouble “finding the time” to read—I read them in every possible in between moment—and books I’ll put the tv on instead of picking up at the end of the day. So I usually have a few different books going at a time, and some never get finished, and I’ve gotten better about recognizing that it’s the book and not my interest in reading that causes the dry periods.
Have you always considered yourself a reader? How were you able to find your way back to reading again (if you took a break when your kids were younger?)
My grandmother was an avid reader and most of my earliest memories are of her—reading to me and reciting poetry and passages of Shakespeare. I’ve always considered her influence a cornerstone of my sense of self and how to live, so reading has always been a part of me. Through high school and college though, most of my reading was for school and it wasn’t until after that I began really just reading for myself. At that time I started following Maria Popova’s blog Brain Pickings and Krista Tippit’s podcast On Being and found those resources to be incredibly motivating for my appetite as a reader.
Then when I became pregnant, my reading life took on a new sense of urgency. Impending motherhood stirred up a kind of search for meaning. I am an atheist who was raised Catholic, and knowing I would be raising my children so differently from my own upbringing, I suddenly felt unprepared for what exactly our home culture would be. I wanted to achieve a greater sense of clarity about the value and belief system I'd be striving to instill. I felt that I wanted to give them a kind of jump start on getting it right, on how to find meaning and purpose in life, how to live a good life and be a good human.
That sense of urgency has yet to settle down. When my children were babies I would pace the living room with them strapped to my chest, bouncing them to sleep with a book in my hand, or sit trapped on the couch as they slept on my chest, reading. Now at five and six years old they are raising even more questions about life and what it is to be a person, their curiosity and wonder drives my own. I often quote Eula Biss in On Immunity writing in reference to Rilke, “we have to live the questions our children raise for us,” that is a part of how I understand my reading life.
What has the act of reading for yourself meant to you since becoming a mother?
Since my first child was born I have stayed home. His sister came sixteen months later, it’s been six years now, my son is in the first grade, but my daughter is still at home with me full time. I have always intended to go to grad school and start a career at some point, and that point keeps drifting farther and farther into the future. My husband is a phD student and we live in student family housing surrounded by students, before that, while he was working, we lived in DC and all the mothers I knew were working mothers, and so being a stay-at-home mother has always caused me a bit of an identity crisis, and left me feeling a bit restless. Reading and writing have been the way I fill that hole, that need for intellectual stimulation, that sense of purpose outside of domestic life.
I have my own ongoing creative project, that for now exists entirely as an inner life I am cultivating. I protect that time, I guess its my form of “self care”. At the end of the day I will leave the house a mess and the sink full of dishes, to read, because I know that feeding my mind and my sense of meaning and purpose as a human is essential to my own well-being and ability to be the best mother I can be. While it is something that I do for myself, it is entirely entangled with my role as a mother—in how I choose what I read, how I relate to it, and how it shapes my world view. Our house is full of books and my children see me reading often, I do hope my habits influence their own.
Do you have any memories of a particular book that moved you as a parent or that was otherwise bound up in your journey into motherhood?
I became very interested in literary writing on motherhood and feel compelled to read through all of it that I can find to compile my own “motherhood archive.” The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, On Immunity by Eula Biss, Ongoingness by Sara Manguso, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, all of Elena Ferrante, Sarah Menkedick’s work, Little Labors by Rivka Galchen, The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits, The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, Motherhood by Sheila Heti, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, Florida by Lauren Groff, Joy Enough by Sarah McColl—these have all been important to me. Ongoingness and Dept. of Speculation I have read at least three times each. I was also deeply impacted by Heroines by Kate Zambreno, which was not about motherhood but about the complicated history of female artists and the perceptions and treatment of their mental health, which I read after my daughter was born ten weeks prematurely, while I was struggling with postpartum post traumatic stress. Citizen by Claudia Rankine had a huge influence on me and is probably the book I have most often recommended to others.
I am also drawn to a lot of science writing, particularly on physics, particularly by Janna Levin and Carlo Rovelli, and on cognitive science and neuroscience—all things that inform my ideas about what it is to be human and alive in this world. I think a lot about the ways my experience of both time and my “self” have shifted since my children were born. The fluidity and ongoingness of both, the way nothing is ever still and everything is change. I think about the ways the boundaries of my “self” shifted through pregnancy and motherhood, the embodied nature of our existence and how that is expansive in the ways it entangles us with everyone and everything else. These are themes I have found reverberating and reinforced through this reading. When my husband first started his phD I took a grad seminar here at UC Berkeley in the Women's Studies department that focused on Science and Technology Studies, and even, maybe especially, there, the books we were reading spoke to these ideas, particularly Donna Haraway’s work, which turned out to have an incredible influence on my thinking and has shaped the world view I am mothering with.
