Naima Coster | Mama’s Writing
"I didn’t grow up with many examples of mothers who considered their own needs as sacred. I’m trying to learn for myself and to normalize it for my kids."
Mama’s Writing is Raising Mothers’ monthly interview series, created by Deesha Philyaw and curated by Sherisa de Groot.
(she/her) is the author of two novels, What’s Mine and Yours, a New York Times bestseller, and Halsey Street, finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. She is at work on her third novel and lives in Brooklyn with her family.Connect: @naimacoster on Instagram
How has the experience of raising children shaped your own personal growth as a writer and as an individual?
Becoming a mother and caring for my children every day has given me so much more empathy for myself as a daughter. Before, obviously, I knew I once was a child, but I get it so much more viscerally now—how vulnerable I was, how precious, how much I needed. I had a very painful childhood, and becoming a mother has made my heart break in new ways for the girl I was. I’ve become much more serious about my healing and conserving my energy since having children. That’s in part because I know my children need me. But I also see how much care and tenderness I still need.
My forthcoming novel is about how you confront your own past when you become a parent. It follows two lifelong friends whose relationship is tested during their first year of motherhood.
If you could go back and give yourself advice before becoming a parent, what would it be?
I’d tell myself, Make a plan for how you’re going to rest. I got pregnant with my first child less than a year after I published my first novel, Halsey Street. I was so worried then about how being a parent would hinder my ability to write. But work has remained so central to my life—out of ambition, conditioning, necessity. The thing that has proved harder to hold onto has been rest. Sleep, exercise, seeing friends, reading, doing nothing.
How do you navigate societal expectations or stereotypes as a Black parent in your writing while staying true to your authentic voice?
When I write, I imagine I am writing for someone who is like me. I am the intended recipient of the narrative. That premise helps me focus on craft and story. With my novel in progress, I’ve sometimes worried that the book is too domestic, too much about birth and the body and desire, and that all the postpartum sex will seem scandalous! But if the book is for me, then it’s just right. I want to read a book that is messy, embodied, and real. I want to read about Black women, two motherless mothers, muddling through that first year, facing how their babies have changed their bodies, their partnerships, their ideas of a good life, even their bond to one another.
What themes or topics do you find yourself drawn to explore in your work since becoming a parent, and why?
I’ve always written about class, but now I’m writing much more about class and parenting. There was so much rhetoric coming out of the pandemic about the costs of motherhood and caregiving without social supports—but we're not all in the same boat. We have different resources, different histories. Our motherhood journeys are not the same. Even among my friend group, class differences have always been there, but they’ve become even more profound and seismic once children were involved.
How do you handle creative challenges or setbacks?
To be honest, I need a lot of pep talks. I turn to my friends, talk through plots with my husband. I have an amazing editor and agent. There are writers I love who support me and cheer me on. So much of writing is a mental game, facing your own self-doubt and insecurities, and it helps to know there are people who believe I can do it. Their confidence helps me tap into whatever faith I have too.
How do you navigate the fine line between sharing personal experiences in your writing while respecting the privacy of your family?
There is a lot I don’t write about in my nonfiction. I don’t share very much about my children, my marriage, or my friendships. I feel differently about relationships that have ended. I wrote an essay for Elle about being estranged from my mother, but even that piece was full of omissions, both to protect others to some degree, and to spare myself because there were things that were still too tender, too raw to share.
Fiction is different because you can take any emotion or incident or hard thing out of the personal, and transform it so that you can understand it, mine it in a new way. You don’t have to retell anything that happened. But there’s still emotional exposure in fiction. Even then you have to write with a lot of care and restraint.
How do you carve out time for self-care, down time, and creative expression?
This is a constant struggle for me—I don’t want to give a fake answer. I work a lot. I would love more time to myself. Before I had kids, I hiked, ran, did yoga, saw friends, read a lot. Now I do all that, but much less. I didn’t grow up with many examples of mothers who considered their own needs as sacred. I’m trying to learn for myself and to normalize it for my kids. I tell them, Mommy needs rest; Mommy needs to move her body; Mommy needs time with her friends.
How has your parenting journey impacted your perspective on your writing career and artistic aspirations?
My second novel, What’s Mine and Yours, came into being at a time when I wondered whether I’d be able to sustain my writing life as a new mother. I wrote the book when I was pregnant, and it was published before my daughter was two. I was so proud of that book and its success, and I thought then, I did it! I figured it out!
But in some ways balancing career, creativity, and parenting hasn’t gotten any easier since then. Some people say it does, but that hasn’t been my experience yet!
I am slowly surrendering the idea that I can push my way through anything and achieve. That probably wasn’t ever true, but it’s definitely not true now. I am slower. My kids get sick. Sometimes I don’t have childcare, and there is no one to help. My body needs my attention. So does my grief. I want to write, but I also want to be out in the world experiencing life with my family. I need a lot of grace, and I need time.
How have other mother figures you have encountered in your community influenced your parenting? Your writing?
Writing and parenting are much harder when you feel alone—I am lucky that other writing mothers have encouraged me and supported me, and have helped me feel less alone. To name a few: Megha Majumdar, Cleyvis Natera, Elizabeth Acevedo, Meghan Flaherty, Melissa Rivero, Crystal Hana Kim, and Kaitlyn Greenidge.
As a motherless mother, I am especially hungry for elders. For their love, their guidance. I have wonderful aunts. My therapist definitely mothers me in a way. And I’ve always looked up to the writer Angie Cruz, long before I met her, when I was just a Dominican twenty-something reading Soledad and hoping maybe one day I could write a book too.
Now Angie is someone I deeply admire, whose books and example I continue to cherish. I try to listen to whatever she says and learn from her!
What advice would you give to other mothers who aspire to pursue their writing goals while raising a family?
I’d say, Make sure you’re writing what you want to write. As a mother, there are so many things we must do that are not for ourselves. For the writing to be regenerative, we must feel some ownership over it. Otherwise, it’s just another task and obligation. Yes, writing is work and requires discipline, but there must also be pleasure and play and power in it. It has to be for you first, not for some imagined reader, or publisher, or critic. You have to like it. It has to be born from a deep, autonomous interest or motivation in you. That’s the only way that the writing will feel like a refuge.
Who are your writer-mama heroes?
I love
. I don’t know her personally, but I was already a fan of Like A Mother, and then Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change rocked my world.In terms of people I know, I hesitate to name any because there are so many writer-mamas I respect and love. But you said heroes, so I’ll name just three!
because she writes about trauma, love, mothering, and being unmothered in the most raw, gorgeous way I have ever read. She is a trusted first reader for me and answered all my frantic texts when I was pregnant and postpartum for the first time. She’s working on her second memoir now, and it is brilliant.Cleyvis Natera because her novels are incisive, original, and funny as hell, and she is a generous, amazing literary citizen who shows up for other writers. It’s rare to be so talented and also so kind, but
is. She brought me a lasagna after the birth of my second kid.And Elizabeth Acevedo because she is a trailblazer, a writer of astonishing power, who can be so real, so open-hearted, both on the page and in real life. She has a beautiful spirit and has encouraged me as both a writer and a mother. She sent me a good luck charm once when I needed it.
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Beautiful interview! Thanks for this!