Rewriting the Script of Matrescence Memoir: A Conversation with Erica Stern

In early 2025, I read Erica Stern’s first book, Frontier: A Memoir & a Ghost Story (Barrelhouse, 2025), in which she addresses the traumatic birth of her eldest son. At the time, I was a little over six years out from my own harrowing experience of bringing my daughter into the world and had struggled to find ways to reflect on it in prose that avoided (quite literal) navel-gazing. Erica’s work—an astonishing warp and weft of raw memoir and meticulously researched historical fiction—introduced me to fresh, meaningful, and profoundly pleasurable ways of writing about the painful scars left by umbilical ties. Our conversation took place a few months later in mid-summer, several weeks after the book’s official release. We connected via Zoom to discuss narrative hybridity, etymological sensibility, and the persistent taboo of maternal ambivalence, among other things.

Erica Stern‘s work has appeared in places such as The Sun, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, LitHub, Denver Quarterly and The Wall Street Journal, and has been named a finalist for the Noemi Press Book Awards and the Mississippi Review Prize, among other recognitions. A native of New Orleans, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

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Elizabeth Brogden: While stylistic experimentation and generic hybridity aren’t uncommon features of what we might call “narratives of matrescence” (I’m thinking in particular of work by people like Rivka Galchen, Sabrina Orah Mark, Olga Ravn, Kate Zambreno), Frontier feels particularly original and unexpected in its unique combination of memoir and ghost story. Could you start by talking a bit about how you arrived at this pairing?

Erica Stern: The hybridity came about by accident, or at least from instinct. This project started out as a straightforward memoir, but I was preoccupied with how birthing in general—the absolute loss of control over the body, the wildness of it—and also the specific way things went wrong medically for me, felt so removed from modernity. Perhaps contradictorily, I was aware that while things had gone wrong, they could have been much worse without modern medical intervention. So I wrote a short paragraph in the middle of the description of my labor, beginning with the hypothetical: What if I had given birth in the Wild West?This allowed me to literally manifest the sense of existing in multiple timelines at once, which had been so visceral and disorienting for me during and immediately after delivery. I was in the very modern hospital and also in a cabin with a dirt floor. I was surrounded by sterile, technologically-advanced equipment and somewhere without modern plumbing or electricity. I kept coming back to that what if, because I realized the concepts of splitting and fracturing and liminality were at the heart of the book.

Initially, even though I kept returning to the hypothetical as I wrote, it remained just a thread woven into the memoir—one among many. It wasn’t its own story with a formal separation from the nonfiction.As I continued to write, a mentor pushed me to expand the fictional thread, pointing out that the story needed more space to grow. At that point I made the decision to extract the Wild West pieces from the memoir, creating separate chapters, and giving the fiction room to take off and become its own narrative, distinct from but in conversation with the memoir.

Brogden: This is essentially a book about boundaries and thresholds: life and death; pre- and postpartum; past and present; expectations and reality; the literal linea alba of the C-section scar; etc. And yet, it is a very non-linear narrative, and I imagine the process of writing it was far from straightforward. Can you talk a bit about this tension, or alignment, between content and form (and composition)?

Stern: Part of it for me is this resistance, which I talk about pretty straightforwardly in the book, to tidy narrative and dramatic arcs as most writers and readers have been taught to expect them. I felt like my son’s birth destroyed the narrative I’d heard about giving birth and becoming a mother, and I had to recreate a story for myself. So I wanted the form to reflect that muddling—the never-fully-reaching-the-conclusion (although I did have to push myself to provide some sense of arrival, even if it wasn’t going to be a neat ending). I was also very interested in boundaries—of the body, of selfhood, of time—and in what could and couldn’t be transcended. Like the feeling I had in the delivery bed that I was in the twenty-first-century hospital and in some pre-modern world at the same time. Or the sense that I was only nominally the same person as I was before giving birth, that I’d left my old self behind. So weaving together my actual memories and the fictional narrative felt like a natural reflection of the way boundaries suddenly blur in motherhood.The ghost, of course, also allowed me to explore a literal crossing of the threshold between life and death, a border I felt so close to in the delivery room. I think this is part of the contradiction of motherhood, this crossing of lines that before seemed immutable.

Brogden: As a reader who also happens to be a mother and a writer, I found one of the most moving and powerful aspects of Frontier to be the honesty with which it addresses the still-taboo theme of maternal ambivalence. How did it feel to write with such rawness and vulnerability about this stigmatized emotional territory?

Stern: I think it was liberating to write about it in retrospect, because I couldn’t let myself express the deep ambivalence in the moment. The script in the hospital didn’t let me (suddenly I was being referred to as “Mama”), and then after we got home I felt I had to be laser-focused on my kid’s health and development. It was too painful to admit that in some ways I felt like I’d made a huge mistake. My life had veered off track; I hadn’t signed up for this kind of all-consuming parenting.I wondered if I’d ever get back to the things that I cared about before, like writing. I felt a sense of loss of the self. It was also difficult to confront the tension between being a firm believer in disability rights, and feeling really conflicted about the realities of parenting a potentially disabled child. I was scared.

Writing allowed me to articulate the contradiction: I was desperate to parent my baby, I loved him completely, and also, somehow, I wanted a redo. Why did I need to mother this baby in particular? He wasn’t fully a person to me yet. Actually, I think that lack of connection is true for so many mothers, regardless of the circumstances of their deliveries. The myth of instant maternal-child bonding makes so many of us feel like failures. I wanted to push against that expectation that we feel an immediate call to motherhood.

Brogden: Who were you in conversation with while writing this book? What precedents and interlocutors did you have in mind, aside from those you reference directly?

Stern: I was careful when choosing what to read when drafting the book. I felt a sort of anticipatory anxiety of influence. I didn’t want too many voices narrating birth getting into my head and seeping onto the page, and so I created a bit of a protective moat around myself to avoid being overly inundated in motherhood and birth stories. I read illness narratives, such as Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay. I read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (speaking of maternal ambivalence), which, while clearly a motherhood book, felt distinct enough from my project. Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index modeled how formal hybridity can facilitate engagement with trauma and grief. There were many others, of course, including writers I’m in dialogue with directly in the book, such as Nella Larsen on plot and expectation and Adrienne Rich on motherhood and society. And then there are books I hope Frontier is in conversation with now that it’s out in the world, like Shayne Terry’s singular Leave, which also came out in 2025. It’s a harrowing account of Terry’s third-degree tear during delivery and the postpartum period that followed. People overuse the term “unflinching,” but it really is the right word for this one.

Brogden: Temporality is obviously a huge theme in this particular text, which not only shifts between the 19th and 21st centuries but also deals with the simultaneous ancestralism and prolepsis of pregnancy, which is itself a kind of biological time travel (in an epigenetic sense and to the extent that the next two generations can inhabit a single uterus). At the same time, of course, on a meta-narrative level, time is a crucial element of memoir (I think of Vivian Gornick, for example). But I’m interested—perhaps very crudely—in the logistical aspects of time as it pertains to trauma, childrearing, and writing. How long did it take you to be able to write about what happened to you? How did being denied a “typical” birth story impact your need or ability to narrate it? And also, how did you practically manage to carve out time (and headspace) to write, both during and after the MFA, while also parenting?

Stern: It took me about a year to start writing. Partly this was emotional—I was nowhere near grounded enough to write for many months after delivery—and partly this was logistical. I was the primary caregiver. My son started a preschool program when he was about fifteen months old, and at that point I returned to my MFA. I had a large portion of a short story collection that I thought would be my thesis, and my intention was to finish that. But when I started writing again it was as if a different person had drafted everything I’d produced prior to the birth, and I couldn’t reenter that space. The only thing I could write was this. It was almost a compulsion, which perhaps stemmed from a need to confront the “standard” birth narrative and correct it with my own version of delivery and motherhood.

In order to carve out space for writing, I treated the writing like a job during the hours when I had child care. This got a little trickier after I finished my MFA, when I no longer had the structure of deadlines. My graduation also coincided with the birth of my second kid, which of course added some chaos to the mix. I had to be gentle with myself, accepting that there were weeks and even months when I didn’t have the capacity to write. I tried to count small things as writing—jotting bits into a notebook or in the notes app of my phone during naptime or while out on walks or after my husband got home and took over with the kids. And then during calmer stretches, I found the time to get back into a more consistent routine.

Brogden: You are explicit in the book about the ways in which HIE (Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy), the terrifying complication Jonah experienced, intensified the feeling—arguably true of motherhood in all its iterations—that you had to sort of “write” the “blank page” of his infant brain (which had literally suffered neurological erasure). And this goes back to the classic anxiety about writing and motherhood, with us since antiquity, which is that they are mutually exclusive. (This doesn’t seem to be nearly as true, I think it’s still fair to say, for male writers who also happen to be dads). Could you speak a bit about how you’ve navigated this stubborn legacy of patriarchy—the idea that good motherhood comes at the expense of great writing, or vice versa—in your own life?

Stern: I absolutely feel I would be a worse mother if I did not give myself the space to write. But especially in the beginning it was hard to attend to my writing because of that pull to intensively parent Jonah (and I love how you frame it as writing the story of his brain). I think many mothers experience societal pressure to create optimal conditions for their kids’ growth and development. And that pressure was amplified, for me, because of Jonah’s injury. From the beginning, doctors placed a big emphasis on the power of early experiences to shape his outcome, on the possibilities of brain plasticity. It was reassuring to have some semblance of control in a situation where I generally felt I had so little, but with it came an overwhelming sense of responsibility and a lot of guilt. If I wasn’t fully present with Jonah, if I didn’t make the best use of each day, it felt like a fatal shortcoming. I’m sure my husband felt this to some degree, but our society tends to place the onus of the parental burden on women, and I wasn’t immune to that. I was also the one sitting in on all of his therapy sessions and doctors’ appointments.

For the first year of motherhood I struggled to find a balance between my needs as a writer, my outside interests and ambitions, and my sense of maternal obligation. At a certain point I recognized that I was bored (there were only so many hours I could sit and match shapes in the shape sorter), and I also knew that I couldn’t let my years of graduate work go to waste. On some level, I understood that I would be more present as a mother if I honored my intellectual needs.It helped that family and friends encouraged me to make room for myself. In particular, I remember Jonah’s speech therapist telling me that not only was daycare okay for him, but it would actually be beneficial for him to be in a classroom setting, surrounded by peers. That greenlight from an “expert” was key.

Brogden: Did you have any fear of being bogged down by the magnitude of the trauma you were addressing?

Stern: I really didn’t, actually, because I was already stuck in it. In that way, writing about it didn’t feel risky to me at all. The birth was constantly on my mind, whether I was writing about it or not. The book allowed me to channel something I was already in the thick of into something I enjoyed doing and that felt meaningful.

Brogden: The interest in etymology is, personally, one of my favorite aspects of the book, and it seemed linked, to me, with the important role that religion plays (insofar as Judaism is an intensely hermeneutical faith tradition). Some of the most riveting moments, for me, are ones in which you take an almost exegetical approach to medical treatises or diagnostic language or MRI images. And I wonder if you could speak a bit about this attachment to the deep history of words, from a patient’s perspective, or the excitement of acquiring new vocabulary even amid the dystopia of the NICU.

Stern: Like most writers, I’ve always been interested in words—their history, their sound, how they shift and change over time. Being immersed in medical jargon heightened this interest, because there were all of these new terms thrown around in the hospital that were quickly becoming absorbed into my daily vocabulary. In a way I was like a baby myself, suddenly surrounded by nonsense sounds that I had to make sense of. The doctors didn’t seem attuned to the strangeness of so much of their language, or the way their words could be so freighted with emotional baggage, but as an outsider I was. Some of the things that stuck with me were medical terms, names for parts of the brain or patterns on the EEG. Just as often, though, I would be struck by the way a doctor or nurse spoke in layman’s terms about a treatment or condition. One example of this from the book is how the neurologist described Jonah, when he was sedated under medications, as being “snowed.” It wasn’t a medical term, but it provided a different way of seeing and understanding my child in that moment.

I was also fascinated by the role of jargon in providing the medical staff with emotional distance, or keeping the patient and family at arm’s length. For instance, they used the more sanitized, hyper-technical “hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy” instead of the raw, old-fashioned term “birth asphyxia.” Many of the terms required translation. I would listen in on rounds but only understand a portion of the conversation and would need the nurses to explain what was being discussed. Overall the foreign quality of the hospital language opened up this completely new space to think about the aesthetics and functionality of language, especially very technical or jargon-y/specialized language.

Brogden: Frontier offers such a blistering critique of the irony inherent in contemporary movements like tradwifery and “freebirth,” whose nostalgia for pre-industrial labor, whether at home or in the wild, seems mostly incompatible with acknowledging (much less grieving) the huge loss of life it often entailed. These “non-invasive” philosophies measure the “success” of a delivery by how little assistance the mother received, ignoring the fact that countless maternal and infant lives have been saved by modern medicine. How do you make sense of this?

Stern: There are so many layers to this. On the one hand, there’s a deeply-rooted misogyny in the idea that women’s bodies are “made for this,” that we shouldn’t need the sterility of modern medicine. Often this is based in the belief motherhood is a natural, crowning achievement for women, and that a “real” or “genuine” woman should be able to get pregnant and give birth without modern medicine. If a woman needs intervention, it’s somehow her fault; she is somehow not womanly enough.

At the same time, modern medicine isn’t perfect. Obstetrics, in many ways, was shaped by men who dismissed the expertise and lived experiences of women, especially women of color. The field retains a lot of those misogynistic and racist components despite efforts to modernize. Women still feel, rightly, that their voices aren’t always heard, that their pain is ignored or that they have procedures pushed on them without their full consent. This leaves room for those critical of medicine to move in, for those voices to carry more weight.

We’re unfortunately living in a time of increased skepticism in science, which isn’t only limited to birth, but to vaccines and other areas of healthcare that are being dismantled by the current administration. And as with vaccines, I think that maternity care has fallen victim to its own success. Women and babies don’t die regularly in childbirth anymore, so it’s easy to think of birth as something that doesn’t require medicine to happen safely.

Brogden: Yes. In Frontier, you do such a magnificent job of reminding us why this kind of selective amnesia or pastoralist view of history is so insidious and dishonest (whether it comes at the hands of social media influencers or the federal Secretary of Health). And you manage to challenge those views in a way that feels playful and inventive (notwithstanding heavy subject matter), rather than didactic or polemical. Quite a feat in our discord-riven times, especially on themes as consistently polarizing as reproductive autonomy and maternal well-being!