In 2014, when Lacy Johnson was reading from her memoir The Other Side, an audience member asked her what she’d like to see happen to her kidnapper/rapist. Her latest book, The Reckonings: Essays, partially addresses that question. But these essays are also about violence against women, politics and art, climate change, race and privilege, the notion of justice, and joy. I found myself underlining paragraph after paragraph. Lacy takes our assumptions about justice, suffering, happiness, and revenge, and turns them inside out, examining the stories we’ve made of them and why. By challenging these notions to the very core, she brings a different truth to light. All of these essays feel urgent and necessary.
I was able to catch up with Lacy over email to discuss her book, current events, motherhood, and more.
These essays are so relevant right now, breathing and evolving with us. In “Speak Truth to Power,” you say that while we know men have power as a group, women do, too. I think we’ve seen this in the past two years especially, and hopefully with midterms coming up, we’ll see it even more. Much of this book feels like a call to women to recognize their autonomy, their power, their agency. Did you think of the essays as a collective whole from the start, or did that come later?
It really does feel like we’re on the precipice of some extraordinary shift, doesn’t it? One where we each, as women, not only begin to recognize the autonomy, power, and agency we might have as individuals and as a group, but also where we claim it, demand it, and use it to bring down the old structures and systems that have hindered us from not realizing our power more fully until now. That was one of the most moving things about the Women’s March the day after the inauguration: millions of women around the world, on every continent (even Antarctica), demonstrating our collective power. I think that moment and those that have followed in the years since have taught us that we do have power together, and that the only power worth wielding in these times emerges through that deeply intersectional-feminist idea of a radical, unwavering, collective commitment to one another’s power and joy.
That idea is at the center of all of these essays, which span a range of topics, all of which deal with working toward justice in an unjust world, but at the center of them all is that core principle. I think that idea was probably there as an intuition at the beginning of the process, and it became my fiercely held intellectual, emotional, and philosophical conviction by the end.
I found “Against Whiteness” to be especially thought-provoking, since I had recently read Sarah Smarsh’s book about class, Heartland. There’s a line that struck me: “Most white people haven’t even always been white…. Even now, Donald J Trump is white in a different way from how Honey Boo Boo is white. This is not a denial of racism or the real and devastating effects of white supremacy on the lives of people of color, but rather an acknowledgment that whiteness is constructed, and its construction has everything to do with power and very little to do with skin color.” Why do you think this idea is something that so many people push back against?
I think some people—white folks in particular—want to believe that whiteness describes something inherent and biological so that we don’t have to grapple with the fact that whiteness exists only as a result of the oppression of people of color. We want to believe that the things we have and the opportunities we’ve been granted have come to us through our own hard work and merit, because if we understand our privilege comes at the cost of other people’s oppression, we would have to also understand that we’re responsible and culpable for those injustices—their long and violent histories as well as all that’s happening in the right here and now—and that’s something that most white folks don’t want to think about, much less admit.
When I was pregnant, I had this idea that once I had my son, my life and work would be the same, just with a kid. So, when reality hit, I was kind of unprepared for how hard the juggling was—and is, even now, two and a half years in. Now I am intensely interested in the process of being a working mother. What have you done to maintain a space for yourself and your work (writing and otherwise) within motherhood? Has that changed over the years as your children have gotten a little older?
I usually have a policy to politely decline to answer questions about balancing my work with my motherhood since men typically don’t get asked questions about balancing their work with fatherhood, but I think I’ll make an exception this one time, since I know there are many writers who are also parents and are trying to figure out how to make it work. The truth is this: I am very protective of my time. I don’t volunteer at my children’s school. I don’t offer to bring refreshments for the school party and don’t often invite children over for playdates. My children always have food to eat, and there’s always an adult supervising them, but sometimes that person is not me. A lot of times that person is my husband—not because he is a hero, but because our marriage is a partnership, and in that way I think it is exceptional. I am grateful to him when he offers to give me space to do my work, but I think it is unfortunate that more partnerships are not configured this way. I also have babysitters I can pay to watch my children while I work, and I don’t allow myself to feel shame or guilt when I need to hire them. I sometimes ask my mom to come down to help out. She is very willing. Once I put my children on a plane and sent them to stay with my dad for a week when I was on deadline. He was happy to do it. I am lucky to have all of this support, and to be sufficiently affluent that it is a possibility. It hasn’t always been this way. When my children were younger and these ways of making time were not options, I stayed up late or got up early. I wrote in short bursts of fury while they took naps in the afternoon or after they went to bed. My first two books are written in vignettes precisely for this reason: because this is the amount of writing I could do in the time that I was given. Now that they’re older and in school and more self-sufficient, I find myself able to write longer passages of prose. I write a lot while they’re in school, and I don’t waste that time doing other things because those other things are not as important to me as having time to do my work. That said, I do spend part of each day giving my children my full attention. They know that they are important to me, and that my work is important to me; that I find my work both difficult and rewarding, and that this work also requires my attention. This is not a popular view of balancing work and motherhood, and I recognize that I am not what is considered a conventionally “good mother.” I am more than very fine with that because my children are learning by my example that their work can also be important, and that there is value in dedicating time and attention to work that challenges them in ways they must rise to meet.
Thank you. I really appreciate your answer. You bring up a lot of great points, like partners parenting and how that should be the norm and not the exception, and delegating childcare and protecting one’s time, and how writing styles might change because of time constraints. I am forever fascinated by this idea of a “good mother” that seems to be holding on tight, unchanged, despite all of the feminist movements and changed social mores. That one has staying power.
How do you think the creative community can support women, and mothers, especially?
I think it would be helpful if the creative community didn’t demand so much of women that so many of us have to consistently choose between spending time on one’s career and on one’s family. The two shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Writers who are mothers are often seen as too addle-brained by motherhood to be serious writers, or to have a command of philosophy or theology, or really anything at all, as if motherhood has rendered us incapable of having anything interesting to say about the world. There’s so much misogyny in this bias, and I see evidence of it in the way these communities regard women more generally: that work women do is less serious and important than work men do—even when they are doing the same job—and that the only people who might value the work we do are other women who do that work too. If the literary community in particular would commit to making sure at least half of what they read each year (books, articles, stories, poems, journalism) was written by women—especially by women of color—and to reviewing it, talking about it, honoring it, and generally just giving it the same kind of consideration we give work by men, I think that would at least be a start.
Yes. So often I hear that refrain of “I don’t pay attention to the author; I just read good writing,” which is such crap.
In the book you say that a week after the Presidential election, you asked your students “What is art for, if not precisely this moment?” That hit home for me. There seems to be this explosion of creativity and expression borne out of the resistance—and in the case of your books, out of trauma. You write about the concept of justice in the first section of your book, and I can’t help but think art can be a form of justice, for lack of a better word. What has art been for you?
Art has allowed me to see not only what is, but also what is possible, and because joy has sometimes been among those possibilities, then I think, yes, art can sometimes be a form that justice takes. Art can help us realize (in all the senses of that word) our potential. By bending us more in the direction of our potential selves, art changes us, and that change in us reshapes the world, however subtly. Right now, in this political moment, lots of people are trying, not so subtly, to reshape the world in unjust ways. Propaganda shapes us, for instance, or it tries to. And mandatory text messages directly from the President—those have the power to shape us as well. But art also has that power. We can’t pretend we’re out of options. We all know from our own lives how this works: how art can unfold something in us we didn’t know existed, and how that brilliant unfolding thing can become a center around which we begin to grow and gravitate.
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
Oh my goodness, I so wish I had time to read anything right now besides my students’ work (which is great; don’t get me wrong), but I would give my right pinky toe for time to sit down and read a book. I’ll tell you what I’m excited to read instead: I just got a copy of Nicole Walker’s Sustainability: A Love Story. I got to read a copy of Heavy by Kiese Laymon this summer—it is most certainly at least as good as everyone is saying. I’m eager to read The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Wang when it comes out next year from Graywolf. I also just got a big stack of books about wolves that is crooning to me from my nightstand.
What advice would you give to a writer trying to juggle parenthood and writing?
My advice is this: spend your time on what feels both good and important at the same time. Anyone who tells you that you must choose between one or the other does not have your best interests at heart.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
Earlier this year I launched The Houston Flood Museum, which is project of communal remembering about the catastrophic flooding that increasingly affects us here on the Gulf Coast—and elsewhere in the region and the world. I’ll be spending a lot of time on that in the coming years, especially as these extreme weather events happen more and more frequently. The next book project is likely related to that work, and somewhere in the most hopeful regions of my mind I’ve been fantasizing about what it might look like, but that fantasy is still too tender and new to share with anyone yet.
Jaime Rochelle Herndon graduated with her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia and is a writer and editor living in NYC. She is a contributor at Book Riot and a writing instructor at Apiary Lit, and her writing can be seen on Healthline and New York Family Magazine, among others.
Author photo by John Carrithers.