Episode 50: Fighting Patriarchy through Fiction
with novelist Naima Brown
Amy is joined by author Naima Brown to discuss her newest novel, Mother Tongue, exploring the consequences of change, finding our authentic selves, motherhood, right-wing radicalization, and the importance of fiction in our fight against patriarchy.
Our Guest
Naima Brown
Naima Brown holds degrees in Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology and Religious Studies. Her essays have appeared in Vogue Australia, the Guardian Australia, and more. She wrote, along with Melissa Doyle, the non-fiction book How to Age Against the Machine. She has spent over a decade working in news, current affairs and documentary - save for her brief stint in reality TV, which inspired her first novel, The Shot. She was born and raised in Northern California before living and working in Yemen and Afghanistan, and now lives in New South Wales with her husband and her dog. Her second novel, Mother Tongue, was published in March 2025.
Amy Allebest: In 2015, an Australian man suffered a serious accident when a semi-truck sped through a red light, striking the vehicle he was riding in. Upon waking from a coma one week later, this man found to his great surprise that he had been speaking in fluent Mandarin. Whether it was with nurses or doctors, parents or siblings who came to visit him, it was in Mandarin, which he had previously only had a basic knowledge of. It was now flowing naturally out of his mouth. This astonishing story inspired novelist Naima Brown to pen her newest book, Mother Tongue, in which one of the central characters, stay-at-home mother Brynn, awakens from a coma speaking fluent French. The novel follows Brynn and those close to her as she seizes this shift in language to start a brand new existence, throwing her current life and all those who inhabit it into tumult and emotional turbulence, which ultimately changes them all. Mother Tongue is a novel that asks controversial, but too often real questions: What if being true to yourself means hurting the people close to you? What if it means being a bad wife or a bad mother? And why is it women and not men who are far too often forced to make these decisions? It's a novel that challenges our cultural expectations of motherhood, of wifehood, and womanhood. I'm so excited to be discussing it today with the author, Naima Brown. Welcome, Naima!
Naima Brown: Thank you so much, Amy! I'm so happy to be here.
AA: I'm so happy to have you. As per usual, I'll read your professional bio first, and then I'll ask you to introduce yourself a little more personally after that.
NB: Yeah, no worries.
AA: Naima Brown holds degrees in Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, and religious studies. Her essays have appeared in Vogue Australia, The Guardian Australia, and many more. She wrote, along with Melissa Doyle, the nonfiction book How To Age Against the Machine, and she spent over a decade working in news, current affairs, and documentaries, save for her brief stint in reality tv, which inspired her first novel, The Shot. She was born and raised in Northern California before living and working in Yemen and Afghanistan, and now lives in New South Wales with her husband and her dog. And as I mentioned, today we'll be discussing her second novel, Mother Tongue. Again, welcome Naima. I have to ask you, where did you grow up in Northern California?
NB: Thank you for all of that, Amy. I'm a Monterey girl.
AA: Oh, amazing! That's beautiful. We lived in the Mid-Peninsula for 15 years. My kids were born there and they were little there, so that's a place that's close to my heart. But Monterey is amazing.
NB: It is. I feel very lucky. And it's one of those things where had I not left and gone off to different parts of the world, I might never have known what a special place I was from. Sometimes you have to get out and look back over your shoulder and go, “That's actually a very, very special, unique place to call home.”
AA: Yeah, it really is. Well, tell us a little more about yourself. You're from Monterey, but tell us about some of the factors in your life that brought you to do the work that you do today, and what made you who you are?
NB: Oh gosh. Well, how long do we have, Amy? I would say, especially thinking about this incredible initiative and the work that you do, and framing my life through a feminist lens, which is something that I do deliberately every day, I would say that the beginning of this story would be that growing up in a kind of Northern Californian counterculture environment, my first idea of what a career might look like for me was that I would be a home-birth midwife in Big Sur. It really appealed to me this idea of women working outside of the system in distinctly female settings, about our bodies and our needs. I did one year of midwifery school and quickly learned that the actual visceral, dare I say the word “viscous” nature of childbirth and midwifery was not my calling. But what I was really interested in and what had drawn me to that year of working as a doula and as a birth assistant and a midwifery apprentice was that I was interested in the reasons why we “do” birth – and I'm making air quotes there – a certain way in the Western, American model, and why other women do birth differently in other parts of the world, other times, other contexts. And that really shifted how I understood my own interests.
So that's when I set out to pursue anthropology and religious studies and followed that, you know, doorways that lead to doorways that lead to doorways. And that really led me into linguistic anthropology, which then led me into a real love affair with language, which obviously really informs Mother Tongue. I suppose that's a really short version. And then somewhere along that, within those experiences, I kind of diverged. I was on a very academic path for a very long time. I had been living in Yemen, working towards academic goals, very much thinking I was on a PhD track, and had a real seismic shift in my thinking due to some big global events, big shifts in geopolitics. I was living in Yemen when Barack Obama was elected president, and I felt at that time, looking back, I think it was quite naive, but at that time I felt like this kind of new world was dawning and I decided I didn't want to be writing about the Middle East as a white American woman in a PhD thesis that two other people might read in this really niche ivory tower environment. I wanted to be writing and speaking and communicating with a big, vast swath of the world, so I shifted lanes into media and journalism, which I still do now, and which really does inform my novels as well. So, yes, I feel like that might have encapsulated the last 30 years.
AA: Well done! Yes, that was really, really interesting, and I can relate to so much of that. I'm a PhD student right now, and I have this debate with myself all the time.
NB: I don’t mean to look down–
AA: No!
NB: It's just a very interior world to live in, isn't it? What are you writing your PhD on?
AA: Well, I haven't started my dissertation yet, but I'm doing Indigenous studies and the history of colonization, which is something I'm passionate about. But I'm in this debate with my professors quite often about the limited scope of staying in the academic world, and like you said, just a couple of people reading your work or going to conferences where the entire room already knows, like, you're just talking to the people that already are on board. You're preaching to the choir when it's work that you want to get out into the mainstream and actually affect change.
NB: I certainly felt that way, and gosh, I applaud you. I think to be in academia in America at this time must be a really wild ride.
AA: It is wild. Indeed it is. Well, thank you for sharing all of that, and I am so excited to talk about this book. I also have to say, in season one we talked about the book The Awakening by Kate Chopin. It's an early-20th-century novel, and I would say that your book is definitely in conversation with The Awakening and in that same genre of women discovering themselves and then like, “Oh boy, what do I do now?” So, should we get into it?
NB: I'd love to get into it. I'm excited.
AA: I'm really excited too. It also is reminding me of conversations that I'm having with multiple friends of mine right now, to be honest. The book is primarily, I feel, about change and the cost of change. And you've said in interviews before that you are drawn to characters who are in the process of transformation or, and this is a quote, “who are deliberately throwing a grenade into their lives in the hopes that it might reveal a truer, more authentic self.” I'd love to learn more about this. Why does this kind of destructive process of transformation interest you, and what have you learned from exploring it?
NB: I feel like my therapist would probably have something to say about that. I can't always endorse that throwing a grenade at your life is necessarily the best course of action at all times. But no, look, I think one of the freedoms that we have in art, and obviously in this case we're discussing literature and fiction, is to take kind of big risks and follow those risks to their logical conclusions. And almost from a kind of game theory point of view, put all of these kinds of inputs and factors into a situation and then see what comes of that. And I think that part of why I delight so much in doing that with female characters specifically is that very often in our lives we are bound by so many constraints and rules. Some of those rules are enshrined in our legal systems or our political systems, some of them are enshrined in our religious systems. But often I think, as an observer of women and as a woman myself, that it's those rules and regulations that are in our community systems or our family systems, that are really quite close to home or even in the home, that are the most constraining. I suppose sometimes this is referred to as “domestic noir”, but I'm not a big fan of genre labeling, to be honest, especially in literature. I think it, again, puts women primarily in certain categories while men just get to be authors. That's kind of another conversation, this idea of women's literature. Sometimes I think it's helpful, sometimes I think it's really unhelpful, and anyways, that's neither here nor there.
But I think in my own life, I'm really drawn to people and, yes, probably primarily women, who are in a kind of messy middle, who are in a transitional moment in their lives. And I'm particularly drawn to women who almost understand that there's some real alchemical potential in those moments. Because we all have a choice when life throws us into tumult, right? We can resist, resist, resist, or we can go, “What extraordinary opportunity is here right now to become something different, or become something new, or to bring a different part of me into sharper focus that maybe hasn't been able to really step forward before?” So, yes, I just can't get enough of that in fiction, in films, in real life. Give me the messy middle.
AA: Yeah. I love it. Well, let's keep going with that thought and have you tell us a bit more, I gave just a very brief introduction, but tell us about who Brynn is and that event that does throw things into tumult and presents her with that opportunity to make changes.
“...some rules are enshrined in our legal systems or our political systems, some of them are enshrined in our religious systems. But often I think, as an observer of women and as a woman myself, that it’s those rules...that are really quite close to home that are the most constraining.”
NB: Well, firstly, I'm so grateful to you that in your intro to this conversation you included that story about the real life experience of a young Australian man. I think it's about 10 years old now that I stumbled upon it, and my brain kind of did that bear trap clamp down on this experience as an incredible hook to wrap a narrative around, to use writing terminology. It's a really juicy, inciting incident. And I kind of tucked it away for a little while, but I would always return to it. It always kept kind of sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear, chattering away, “You really ought to write something around this idea.” And it got me thinking about, you know, who's freer, really? Again, going back to conversations around constraints and why I like to watch women throw grenades at their life sometimes. Who has fewer constraints than a 20-ish year-old, young, white Australian man in a Western context?
Obviously he underwent a massive trauma that I don't want to minimize, but when this wild, very rare opportunity kind of spun around that lazy susan on the table of life to him, he was able to grab that dish with both hands and just gobble it up, and feel incredibly free to just see where this road might take him. Probably. I've never spoken to him, but I can only imagine with the knowledge that this is unlikely to come around again, this is a very once-in-a-lifetime, if that, kind of moment. So it got me thinking, well, who's less free? Women, mothers, carers. Again, women who are constrained. I won't list it all again by some of those social and community and familial duties. And that's where Bryn was born for me was, you know, what if this same thing happened, but to a woman? Where the reality of her life made grabbing that dish with both hands and gobbling it all up far more problematic.
AA: Yeah. Now's the time in the conversation to introduce Eric, the husband. He's this kind of all-American, conservative husband, and I'll read a quote from the book where you describe that early in their engagement, Brynn had felt uncomfortable with Eric's kind of aggressive male friends, but instead of speaking up, she “decided she’d take cover in tradition – in marriage and motherhood. She would domesticate herself. She would bury herself in The Schedule. She would let the old Brynn go… in order to usher in the new Brynn: Mrs. Mitchell, Jenny’s mom – a tame deer, but a protected one. She would trade in her desires, her selfhood and her courage for the safety of Eric’s steadying palm on her back.” That's the end of the quote. This willingness to trade in selfhood for safety is so familiar, right? I mean, we've all seen it so many times, and I'd love it if we could just dig into that a little bit. Tell us about Brynn's decision to marry Eric, and then what are the broader implications for women making that trade off?
NB: I mean, I think we, as women, know in our bones, across millennia, passed down through generations, that the safest place to be is in the good graces of power. If that weren't the case, then it wouldn't be revolutionary when we push back, right? It wouldn't be paradigm-changing when we rebel. I think that this is something we are seeing in this American moment, a kind of backlash against feminism by women. I know it's rather cheap, and I do try to stay away from Handmaid's Tale references because I know it's kind of the easiest, low-hanging fruit. But in this case, it's too helpful to ignore as a metaphor or an example, that the women who choose to be a part of their own oppression enjoy the spoils of that power. So, Brynn, when she's a teenager in late-’90s Midwestern America, which was my own teenage experience, she has a kind of encounter with public shaming, a big event that happens in her life where she was very unsafe and made herself quite vulnerable. And then the price for that was a kind of ostracization and shaming, and that was around sex and sexuality and public displays of adolescence and girlhood.
And her response to that was to go, “Oh, wow. That was too painful. That cost was too high. I'm going to snap right back to the playbook, to the rule book. I'm not going to step out of line again, because that was terrifying.” And as the quote that you read belies, trade in the wild deer status for a tame deer status. As long as I'm on this protected preserve. And the other thing about Eric is that there's quite a significant age gap, so there's a real kind of paternalistic role that he takes on in her life as well. And I think that she represents what I think a lot of women, especially cis white women in Western democracies often do, is rather than break down the patriarchy, they serve the patriarchy because there are rewards. And I think she was interested in those rewards if those rewards meant that she could almost be left alone. The last thing she wanted at that time in her life was attention.
AA: Yep. That is so true and is such an important insight, even as we try to look at other women in our lives to try to understand things from their point of view and have compassion for women who do uphold patriarchy. To think, “Why would they?” Well, yeah, for safety and for privilege, and maybe for the safety and privilege for their children and keeping them safe and giving them a leg up in the system, which is kind of the only system available for a lot of people. That's really helpful. My next question is a big theme in the book. You talk about the idea that there's a lot of pressure and shame put on “bad mothers” in our society, and especially mothers who are seen as abandoning their children. And it is a very serious thing to really abandon your children. But one of your characters in the book says, “Fathers leaving their families is quotidian and banal,” like we almost don't notice. I'm curious if you could talk a bit about where this disparity between fatherhood and motherhood comes from in society, or maybe in specific examples in the book.
NB: I think your first question in terms of where this disparity comes from in society, I think that'd be a great question for an anthropologist or somebody who could really talk about the early ways that we organized our human communities and the idea of family. But I think what we all know from our lived experience, which is what I do explore in the novel, is that it's one of the biggest taboos, right? There are all the rules that we've been discussing that we're meant to live by, and you can break those rules and you can atone for them or you can make up for them. Or, as Brynn did, you can kind of go, “Sorry, I swung too far in that direction, I'm going to swing all the way back in this direction.” But then there are those uncrossable lines, those big taboos, and I think abandoning motherhood is very high on that taboo list. And I certainly am not being glib about it. I think that through the character of Brynn's daughter who she leaves, Jenny, whose voice really does get prime position in the second half of the novel, we really see that devastating fallout from Brynn's decision. So by no means am I championing this idea of abandoning our children.
But what's interesting to me is the cost to our selfhood of never even indulging in these fantasies, or that there really is no road back. And I also don't mean to minimize that it’s horribly painful for many people when their fathers aren't in their lives. Fathers abandoning their families isn't without consequence either. In fact, it probably has extraordinary consequences, but I think that it's kind of considered one of those “boys will be boys”, you know, as Hillary said about Bill, “a hard dog to keep on the porch,” right? Like it's kind of innate in the male nature to wander, and they might wander back and they might wander off again, and women are not meant to wander. Women are meant to stay and tend home and hearth. There's a moment where Brynn, after she wakes up speaking French and she's not yet decided that she's going to move to France and she's kind of in this in-between phase of her experience, she's watching a documentary on the Nature Channel about nature's worst mothers, and it's about all the horrible things that various bears and birds and other creatures do to their young. And she goes off searching for a documentary on nature's worst fathers, and finds that that doesn't exist, which is, last I checked, true. So, I think it is another one of those paradigms that we live inside of, isn't it? And I don't think that this would've been as interesting of a premise or as interesting of a book if it had been Eric who woke up speaking a different language and left.
AA: Totally. We're so used to that narrative. We're so used to it. In fact, I think I just saw on social media today or yesterday, something about how it's almost a trope, like a convention that we're so used to that we don't even notice it. Like the philosopher, the author, the writer, the poet, who goes and has an adventure in order to cultivate his craft, and he goes on a journey. And then you see somewhere else in the bio, this was his wife and he had eight children, and nobody even thinks about whether maybe that wife was a philosopher or a poet in potential, and she didn't have the luxury of having that career-making journey around the world to write the world-changing book. But we don't even ask that question, we don't even notice it when a man does it. So, to your point. Another question I had on this topic of abandonment, and as you said, yes, you're not glib about it and not advocating that people leave their children. But I guess the question is, how can we prevent it? How can we prevent a man, too, but specifically a woman getting to the point in her life where those are her choices, where she feels like “I'll die if I stay in this situation. I have to take off and blow everything up”?
NB: I have to say, Amy, that might be the most interesting question anyone has asked me about this book.
AA: Well, thank you.
NB: I am delighted by that question and just exploring the answer to that question in real time with you now. Because no one's asked me before, “What would it have taken for Brynn not to have made that decision?” And I think, again, hooking onto what you were just talking about, we're so used to the biographies of great men and these long lists of their accomplishments, and yes, he sired however many children and had however many estates, and these kind of hidden, obfuscated wives and women in his midst whose potential we never get to benefit from and delight in. And I think what it would've taken for Brynn to have chosen a different course for herself, and not, as we say in Australia – I'm not an honorary Australian – “up sticks” and move to France, would've been to know that there was a way she could safely express her most authentic selfhood in that environment. And not only feel safe to express that selfhood, but feel safe to take joy in that selfhood. And I don't see how that could have ever been on the menu of options for her with that particular set of people that she lived with and is involved with and that were in her midst.
I think that what we kind of see in the novel is that in the year before Brynn decides that she's going to leave, we see the people around her, these people who are meant to be her nearest and dearest, who are meant to have unconditional love for her – her parents, her best friend, her husband – that these people are not just put off by the fact that she's now speaks with a silly accent, in their minds, right? They're really troubled by the changes in her behavior. She does try to stay, she does try to see if she can merge these selves into one self. And they don't want that version of her. They make it very clear that that version of her is not welcome, to the point where Eric wonders if she's not acting and putting it all on, or even wonders at one point whether it might be some sort of demonic possession and she's speaking in tongues. Anything other than maybe this woman is becoming a new woman we can all support and nurture and celebrate this with her. And gosh, how do we do that in the world to make sure that women feel that they can reinvent themselves or transform and evolve over time? I mean, you mentioned the book that I co-wrote with one of my best friends here about women and aging. How do we support women through the aging process when we are becoming new and different versions of ourselves? I don't know, Amy. I think you have the answer. I think it's that we have to break down the patriarchy.
“make sure that women feel that they can reinvent themselves or transform and evolve over time”
AA: I think you're right.
NB: All roads lead there, don't they?
AA: Indeed. I think that's so important. And I was thinking about how you address this, I mean, backing up a few questions with that moment when she made the choice to trade in her selfhood for safety and security. The tragedy is that so often we do that when we don't understand the choice that we're making. We don't understand the cost. We're setting ourselves on a road that we don't know the end of and we can't anticipate. And by the time Brynn realizes it, it is kind of too late. And like you said, she did try to stay. So then I think, as you're describing, the onus really needs to be on the people around her, like you said, to be able to accommodate her changes, to be able to embrace her changes and really be curious about, like, “Who are you now?” And that's hard to do, but I think that is the shift. To break down patriarchal assumptions that a woman– or requirements that women be a certain thing, and allow them to grow at different points in their life. I think that's exactly it.
This is so great. One other thing that I want to make sure that we address before we move on from the topic of motherhood is the choice to not become a mother in the first place, and you do address this in the book. One of the characters, Jillian, contemplates this dilemma in the book. I've written the quote down here too. It says, “Jillian was sick of the false binary she'd been offered when she was still in her childbearing years: jubilant mother or pitiable non-mother. There was a world of choice in between these poles, she argued, and it was time to normalize them.” So, what sorts of choices are there out there between these poles, and what does the work of normalizing look like?
NB: I love that question because this is something that if I had a soap box, this would be it.
AA: Okay, go for it.
NB: Yes. We're having this conversation at a time where I am actively working with my linguistic limitations in terms of even finding a label or identifier that I feel comfortable with. I don't have children. However, I don't see myself in words or terminology like child-free, or even trying to get very semantic and weedy with it like “child-free by choice” or “childless”. All of these kinds of monikers that we've tried to discover so that women who don't have children feel that they're being discussed properly. And I don't see myself in any of those frameworks. And part of why I almost find it kind of funny, this idea of being child-free, it's like saying that I live in a world without Scorpios or without 31 year-olds. My world is very populated by children, by mothers, many of whom I'm deeply invested in and very involved with. And I also think it's important to say that not all women, and again, this is that quote, normalizing all of that space in between. Not all women who don't have kids enjoy the company of kids or feel a maternal battery that they want to go and use that energy on children in their life. But many do. I have been a stepmother. No longer, but I have been in the past a stepmother. I have an incredible stepmother and an incredible mother, and I'm also in this kind of privileged position because I don't have my own children, but also because I am, as I mentioned, in community with so many mothers and children. That in the course of researching and writing this book, so many women that I'm privileged enough to know will share the highest highs of those incredible days with me and allow me to delight in their children alongside them, and yet they will also share those lowest lows with me and confide in, even confess some of those lowest lows or even just misgivings, regrets. I believe they share those things with me more than they feel that they can share with other mothers. Because I'm kind of neutral ground, in a way.
So I feel like the character of Jillian, in many ways, she's the nod to myself in the book. She's my cameo. Because at this point, and I don't think this is a spoiler, at this point in the book she's Brynn’s French friend. And at this point in the book, Brynn is starting to feel drawn back to the daughter that she left behind in the States. And Jillian is frustrated by this. She's very much of the mind that men do this all the time. It's quotidian, it's banal. Live your life. You are only going to make things worse if you try to backtrack and backpedal. You don't owe anyone your atonement. In fact, you might end up making things a whole lot worse. She's really quite desperate for Brynn to almost unshackle herself from guilt. And again, that's not necessarily where my moral compass always points. And I have to say, in the writing of this book, there were lots of moments where I'm kind of nodding in agreement with these characters and then I start shaking my head and going, “Oh, wait, nope. Maybe I don't agree with you there.” But that's the joy of fiction.
It was really wonderful to write so many women. And another woman in the book who doesn't have her own biological children, who is very much, I think, the hero mother of the book, is Brynn's best friend Lisa, who has her own quite transformative trajectory. And she kind of steps in to fill that vacuum that Brynn leaves when she leaves. And I don't think we talk about those women enough and honor those women as mothers enough. So yeah, it was really lovely to be able to populate this book with women who are intersecting with motherhood from so many different vantage points. And that, to be honest, the women in this book who did biologically give birth to children are not necessarily the best at mothering. Often it's some of the other women in this book who are better equipped, in certain ways.
AA: Yeah. That's really interesting. My next question, this is backing up a little bit chronologically in terms of the narrative, but I want to dig into this question that you bring up. You talked about this a little bit before with the original story that inspired this story, and the lazy susan on the table. I love it. And what enables some people to take advantage of an opportunity and others not to be able to. I'll read a quote again from the book. This is the point where she does leave and goes to France. It says, “Brynn had smuggled herself out of America. She'd written herself a new story, created a new context and mythology in which to both understand and explain herself. It had never occurred to her that this was a kind of theft, an abuse of power, a wielding of privilege, something that might not have been afforded to her if she weren't white, attractive, and at the same time, young. The trifecta of power in the Western world.” Talk to us about privilege, and I thought that phrase “an abuse of power” was really interesting. How is wielding that privilege in a way an abuse of power?
NB: I think in the character of Brynn, in the context of that quote, and thank you for your beautiful readings, Brynn's partner in France is a beautiful man named Tariq, who is of Moroccan descent. And his mother and sister are these superhero characters, in my mind at least, who work with the repatriation of artifacts and relics. And we could go down– that's probably something you look at in your studies, this idea of antiquities being taken out of their countries of origin to be displayed in the great museums of Europe and the West. And the work of bringing those objects back, that's what Tariq’s mother and sister do. And Brynn is getting away with a lot by the time she encounters Tariq’s mom and sister, in the sense that, as she says, she smuggled herself out of America, she wrote herself a new story, she's living an entirely new life. She's got this kind of circle of friends and colleagues and success around her that are reinforcing this idea of the rightness of what she's done, and that in many ways she feels quite entitled to what she has now. She's wanting to take on this mantle of Frenchness as if it's a real virtue, and as if it's a real upgrade from being American to being French.
And it's not until she meets women who embody the legacy of French colonialism and who are still, in many ways, trying their best to do their little bit to repair the wounds of colonialism, where they challenge her and say, “Well, it wasn't quite so delightful for us when we were told we were French.” Their role in the cast of characters, I suppose, is that they're those characters that see right through her. They're the ones that kind of puncture the story that she's told herself about herself, and she doesn't like to have to think about it that hard. And look, this is where I think the hard work of true allyship and intersectionality, you know, the rubber really hits the road here. She feels like she was put through the ringer, she fought against the unfair wielders of power in her own life in order to get herself to France. So can't that be enough? Can't she just be celebrated for that? Doesn't she deserve that? Didn't she work hard for that? And this idea that she might have to pause and interrogate that, and again going back to the true life story, and go, “I have a certain amount of freedom of movement that is actually quite rare and privileged. And I was able to kind of insinuate myself in the lives of my new French cohort because I am pleasing on the eye, I'm of the appropriate age, I look the part.” And yes, she doesn't want to have to look too closely at those factors. And Tariq's mother and Tariq's sister aren't going to let her off the hook that fast, which I really appreciate them for.
AA: I love that, haha. Since you created them, that's great that you appreciate them for it. But it is such an important issue that you brought up, and I'm really, really grateful for that complication of her narrative. So important. Okay, we have time for a couple more questions.
NB: Absolutely.
AA: I want to make sure that we also talk about Eric, the husband. Because in Eric's chapters we get a firsthand view, because it switches perspectives between several characters in the book. And we see how he goes through the process of being pulled to the far right, further from his family and deeper into patriarchal and really misogynistic views. And sadly, this is something that we're seeing writ large now in the culture, and we see this happening through Eric. I'm wondering if you could talk about the inspiration for including Eric's story and having it take that direction, and what do you hope that readers take from this story?
NB: I really appreciate you leaving time for a discussion around Eric. I think he's a really important figure in this book. Eric is, in many ways, modeled after my own father, who passed away about two years ago. As we discussed, I was born and raised in Northern California with these very avant garde, creative parents. My dad is somebody who, for many, many years, kind of into my adolescence, right around the same time that Jenny in the book starts to cotton on that maybe they don't share a worldview. I thought I had this real lefty rebel dad, and I think he was that for a long time. And it's important for me to note that my own father never went down the darker tunnels within tunnels within tunnels of the radicalization path, but he certainly was ensnared by the Fox News machinery, certainly was ensnared by the MAGA cult, and was ensnared later in life by Christian nationalism as well. And I remember really acutely, and this is something I wrote into Jenny's experience, that moment where I suddenly went, “Oh, this is a person who I know loves me more than the sun and the moon, and yet is actively working towards a world, and is very comfortable with the idea of a world where I have fewer freedoms, where I'm less safe, where I'm less free.” And reconciling that is almost impossible.
So that friction between Eric's love of Jenny but his hatred of women, and her– again, it’s not a spoiler, but there's a moment where she says, “I hate the man, but I love the dad.” And I think that those paradoxes of: What do we do with the men in our lives at this moment in time that we will look back on and marvel at, I think, the men who have been caught up in this wave, who just seem to be able to do mental, emotional acrobatics in their own minds to somehow think that they're not actively working against the women in their lives or the marginalized people in their lives? And I'm almost curious to ask you more about Eric in a sense, because I've not lived in the US for about 15 years now. I'm obviously still deeply connected and certainly some of these trends, to put it mildly, are starting to rear their head in Australia, and we're seeing the rise again of the far right in lots of places in Europe. But I think it is a distinctly terrifying time to be a woman in America right now. And I suppose I'm curious how you are going, Amy, and what you feel about these things. I don't know an American woman in my life who doesn't have an Eric in her life. She is still trying to protect a kind of sacred core of love, and bond, and kinship, but it's eroded by what's happening.
AA: Oh, a hundred percent. And I live in a red state and come from a very conservative religious background as my entire extended family's faith tradition, and most of my friends are still a part of that. And I think it's far more extreme here than it was certainly when we lived in the Bay Area, although we were still part of the religious community there. And I would just say for me, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And actually the YouTube channel that I started a year ago, specifically, when I'm writing those scripts for YouTube, I'm running it constantly through filters like, “How can this reach men? How can it reach men's hearts so that they'll actually listen?” So this is something that I think about a lot, and I appreciate having Eric be a three-dimensional real character and for you to include that love of the daughter for her dad, I think is critical. Because if he had just been a flat villain character, it wouldn't have been realistic. It wouldn't have been at all applicable to anybody reading the book. If there's a man reading the book, it would've been easy to say, “Well, I'm not like that.” And for women it wouldn't have been relatable because when I think about men who have been taken by Fox News and radicalized into increasingly farther and farther right stuff, they are men that I love. They're men who are kind to me, and they're men who have wonderful traits and do service for other people and are funny and have all these wonderful traits. So I think if we don't address the complexity, it's at best kind of a waste of time, and at worst it can increase the divide and the chasm will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I think what we have to do is really be real and think about, like, what is it that's causing this in the men that we love? What are they scared of and how can we reach them? But we won't be able to reach them unless they can feel that we do see them as human beings and that we love them. That complexity, I think, is really important.
“this is a person who I know loves me more than the sun and the moon, and yet is actively working towards a world...where I have fewer freedoms, where I’m less safe, where I’m less free”
NB: I couldn't have said it better myself, and I agree with everything you've said. And I appreciate your appreciation for that fully-realized character of Eric, because it would've been easy, even in my own anger, to have to have flattened him and to make him the sum of the ugliest parts of himself. There's a temptation there because I'm enraged by these men, and yet that rage doesn't serve us. I mean, I want to attenuate that. I think there is a place for our sacred rage. I think there is a place for our distinctly female rage. But I think that, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's in terms of: What is the solution? How do we repair? How do we heal? How do we try to make the world, or even just our communities, our homes, safe for the next generation of women? We have to learn what truth and reconciliation looks like, to use political terminology. What does rehabilitation look like? And I think that only happens if we resist the dehumanization, right? There's rebellion in that resistance that I think is really important. Because while we are fighting with our uncles and our dads and our brothers, and our husbands and our sons even, the men who– I liked that term “taken”, because it really does feel like they've been kidnapped by a force so much more powerful than we are individually. But we do have power in the collective, and we have to find a way to bring these people back into the fold. Because while we're fighting amongst ourselves, the tech bros and the titans of industry and all of the would-be dictators, we're serving them in our in-fighting. When our families fracture and our relationships fracture and our communities fracture, that serves them. So yes, it was important to me right to the end. Look, not that Eric gets an easy ride in Mother Tongue. There's comeuppance. But it was important to me that through Jenny's eyes, we could distinguish between the dad and the man and kind of give that a little bit of space to breathe.
AA: Mm-hmm. Well, thank you for that. I also want to say that especially with my YouTube, I'm always running it through filters like, “How can I reach men? How can I phrase this in just the right way so that they'll hear it?” I just want to say that I'm choosing to do that, and I'm choosing to do it for as long as I have the energy to do it, because I have a specific goal in mind. But I'm not advocating that all women should do that. In fact, one of the most exhausting and unfair parts of patriarchy is that women are always having to do that, right? Just be so careful and sugarcoat, and “How can I phrase this?” And some people feel called to be a flamethrower and they should be a flamethrower. And some people feel called to do that kind of nuanced work, and that's what I feel called to and that's why I do that. But I'm not prescribing that and that women should take that.
NB: That's interesting. And I don't know if it's that I'm in the perimenopausal phase of my life, Amy, but I think that at certain hours of the day I'm a flamethrower, and some hours of the day I'm interested in nuance. Some days of the week I am the embodiment of rage, and other days of the week I'm interested in reconciliation and care. I haven't landed on just one yet. As you say, not only is there space for different people to inhabit those different parts of what it looks like to be in resistance at this time in our lives, but there's room for each of us to embody more than one of those.
AA: I love that. Yes, totally. Thanks for pointing that out. Well, I'm sad that our conversation is over. This has been such a delight and so, so rich and interesting. Before I let you go, I'm going to ask you the question that I ask all of the guests, and that is if I can ask you to leave us with an action item. Our theme for season five is: What can we do? So I want to point out the work that you've already done in writing this book, pushing back against patriarchal conventions and doing that work through literature, I think, is so, so important. It reaches so many people and it reaches our hearts and our minds in ways that other things can't. So, kudos to you for this book.
NB: Thank you, Amy.
AA: It's so, so important. And I'm a huge fan of fiction, but also I see the importance of fiction in reaching people. So I'm wondering, aside from writing a book, there may be people listening right now who now feel inspired and called to write books, but what else might you suggest for our listeners if they're feeling inspired on these issues and want to take action?
NB: I'll stay within that vein of, you know, if you have a book in you, write that book. But I would widen it and just say that the world needs your art now more than ever. Not only for all of the kind of granular, boots on the ground, actively resisting authoritarian, patriarchal regimes, which is our daily life at the moment. But also when we look at the way that AI is transforming content, for lack of a better word. We have to make sure that as humans, specifically as human women, that we are making art with our hands, with our brains, with our bodies, and sharing it with each other. Don't let the great be the enemy of the good. Don't wait until you think you have perfected a craft or an art form. Don't wait for permission. Make your art, whatever that is. Express yourself creatively. There is resistance and rebellion in that. Rest, as well, and take care of yourselves.
AA: Beautiful. No one's ever said that before in the whole season, and I love it. That was fabulous. Thank you so much.
NB: Oh, good. Happy I could contribute.
AA: Well, the last thing to ask you is where listeners can find your book and also find your work in general, if you have a website or social media to share.
NB: Thank you for that. Yes, come find me on Instagram. I know I just raged against the tech bros, but hey, it's what we have for now, so find me there. And Mother Tongue and my previous novel, The Shot, are only published in Australia and New Zealand at the moment. Unless, of course, through you and the listeners of this program, there's a groundswell of demand from American women, that might change. But for now, there are some really incredible local independent booksellers in Australia who have shipped Mother Tongue and The Shot to American friends and family of mine. There are obviously shipping costs that I know can be prohibitive, especially at this time in the economy. But yes, I can send you some information if you reach out to me on Instagram or I can send it across to you, Amy, to pop into your show notes. But you do have to probably go out of your way a little bit to find my books in America, but I'm happy to help facilitate that.
AA: Yes, we'll be happy to. We'll have all the information in the show notes, and yes, you can contact either one of us on Instagram. Again, it's Naima Brown, and the book is Mother Tongue. I highly, highly recommend it. Thank you so much for this conversation, Naima.
NB: Thank you, Amy. This has been the highlight of conversations that I've had around Mother Tongue since its publication. I really appreciate it.
