Writing Prompt
Ruthie Ackerman on family mythologies
The news just keeps getting worse, and it’s coming at such a fast clip. I’m frequently finding myself longing to send you all some sweeping missive that would make sense of all the cruelty— but also, I’m overwhelmed. I know you are, too. And of course, there is no sense in the violence we are witnessing, other than to say, in a million different ways, as we always do here, that the cruelty is the point.
But as dark and frightening as the world is right now, I just want to affirm how important it remains to find joy and connection, hope and possibility, to keep making art, and to keep chipping away at our little corners of understanding, imagining and creating something better. However futile or small our actions may seem, they matter.
Some good news:
I hope you can join me and this Monday June 23 for an author salon. We’ll discuss her forthcoming novel, Everyone is Lying to You, which she describes as Gone Girl, but with trad wives. We’ll also talk about trad culture, fictionalizing influencing, the politics of momfluencers, and Jo’s experience writing across genre. This conversation will be held on Substack live— it will be free to tune in live, but you’ll need a paid subscription to Mad Woman or Jo’s newsletter
to watch the replay.I’m in
’s iconic Cup of Jo this week talking about the joys of shared custody.I’m still compiling all your wonderful summer reading suggestions, and I will share the Mad Woman summer reading list hopefully by next week. You’ll be able to purchase books through our Bookshop list and all affiliate proceeds will go to a charitable cause. Feel free to add any final recs to our list over the weekend.
Our Reading Group selected Ursula Le Guin’s “The Space Crone” this month. Upgrade your subscription to join our undoubtedly juicy and intimate conversation on Zoom, Monday June 30 at 4pm PT/7pm ET. We’ll talk about aging, menopause, and the power of what Le Guin calls “the fulfilled Crone.”
Dire Straights, my new podcast with Tracy Clark-Flory, is now live on all your pod platforms. We’ve already received buzz at The Meteor and New York Magazine, and we’re just getting started. The first episode on the “dark feminine,” a beauty trend and dating strategy, is free. Our second episode drops next week.
A writing prompt for your weekend
Today I’m kicking off a new feature for paid subscribers— guest writing prompts. I hope you’ll drop anything you write based on the prompt in the comments below. If you want access to writing prompts like these, and to our Reading Group, past author salons, and more, upgrade your subscription. Paid subscribers make literally everything you read here possible.
Our guest author
This week’s prompt comes from
, author of the new memoir The Mother Code, a tender exploration of motherhood, identity, inheritance, fertility, and mental health. Ruthie is the founder of the Ignite Writers Collective, and her writing has been published in The New York Times, Vogue, Glamour, TIME, and Oprah Daily. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.Ruthie also writes
, a brilliant must-read newsletter on books and writing.
Unraveling Family Mythologies by
When I started writing my memoir, The Mother Code, I believed a bit of family lore that had become the basis for many of my decisions around motherhood. My thinking went something like this: my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother had all abandoned their children so there must be a flaw in my genetic code that would make me abandon my children too. Not having kids was the only way to avoid the curse of maternal abandonment.
But by researching my family – digging through census, divorce and marriage records, and interviewing family members–I realized that those narratives I’d heard about my great-grandmother and grandmother were half-truths and conjecture at best. The myths I’d swallowed as truth with a capital T had lost their power. Now I was left to decide whether to become a mother free from what I believed was my generational inheritance.
Each of us has our own family myths that shape who we are – and the stories we tell ourselves–and it’s only when we realize the truth that we can transform or shift both on the page (and in our lives).
Prompt: Unlocking the Lie
So many of the stories we’ve been told about our foremothers have been based on the rigid rules and expectations of the time they were born into. My great-grandmother and grandmother, for example, had been labelled as crazy and mentally unfit, and yet, the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual wasn’t published until 1952 (way after they became mothers). We label, judge, shame and scold women as a way to keep them in line, to keep the yoke of the patriarchy tight around their necks. But it’s important as writers to unravel fact from fiction. To untangle trauma from truth.
With that in mind, here’s your prompt: