This piece in the New York Times caught me a few weeks ago. It’s a great window into what it must be like to be a mother (or father, I could assume) and an artist, a writer in this case, being torn between writer’s guilt and mommy guilt. But the reason I put this article aside for the blog was because of the excerpt below. What a fantastic observation of how this novelist’s mind works.

“Writing is so much about the work of noticing. Fiction writing in particular demands intense noticing — studying how the emotional scaffolding of a human is built. When we’re not ignoring our loved ones in order to go write, we are living like watchmakers — picking apart conversations, analyzing recurring arguments, holding up to the light the wheels and cogs of our people so that we may understand them, yes, but also so we can learn how to create new people from scratch. You know, like mothers do.”