Nicole Louie

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
For the past decade, I set out to find as many women without children as I could in books, mostly non-fiction. I’m constantly looking for biographies, memoirs, diaries and compilations of letters. In many ways, they are portals to a person's life, and through them, I was able to get to know and feel much closer to some of my favorite authors, most of whom never became mothers by choice, infertility or circumstance. My work as a translator allowed me to cross some language barriers and has also taken me to many countries, which facilitated the discovery of these bodies of work that enriched my life in a million ways. When time allows, I organize this material into lists or collections and share them online. I also create mini-bios with basic information and further reading or suggested links for those who wish to keep learning about each woman. On my social media channels, you’ll find the profiles of over 500 women who have dedicated their lives to something other than motherhood.

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2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
Writing has always been plan A, but paying the bills by doing it was not always possible, so it often fell through the cracks — as in, I’d work as a translator or content curator for companies by day and would write poems, essays and stories on weekends. In 2017, I was hired as a creative writer in-house and got a taste of what it was like to be paid for scribbling words. While my output in that role was more technical than literary, it was creative enough to keep me in a state of flow that expedited the drafting of my first book, Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children. I spent so many years doing bibliographic and field research about childlessness that it was only after I got this job and started having to write every day and quite often towards a specific daily word count that the habit cascaded down to my work outside of the corporate world. Suddenly, I was writing jokes, riddles and trivia by day and chapters of my book by night. It was exhausting, but it was consistent and seeing the steady progress kept me going.

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3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
I’m a maniac note-taker and archivist. I’ll try to capture in one way or another every single thing that catches my attention and makes me go: who is that? | who made that? At first, it was overwhelming and frustrating because I knew I’d never be able to keep up with everything I was trying to remember. But once I understood that that’s just how my brain works and that following the rabbit of curiosity wherever it goes is a great source of joy, I stopped fighting it and used it to my benefit. That meant always having to carry small notebooks in my bag, sticky notes around the house, an infinite Keep app note on my phone where I’ll write things down on the go, and having many albums of places, objects or books I saw somewhere and want to learn more about. This is but step one, though. I had to learn to sort, discard, and develop these things occasionally. That means spending a whole Saturday uncluttering, merging, deleting and labeling some of these items and notes instead of writing new pieces and only keeping the ones that excite me after a while. When they survive a few of these spring cleaning cycles, I know they are something I wish to include in my future work. And when I feel ready to tackle a new project, it’s one of these items, images or notes that will stand out in my “Pandora box” folder and be selected for researching and writing about.

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4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
I don’t restrict myself to a method or stick to a routine in any way unless I have a pressing deadline. The only thing I try to retain in my mind when creating something is the theme I’m reaching for, so I’ll keep repeating it in my head in various ways, and I’ll often toggle between English and Portuguese to see if a new association or way of thinking about that theme will present itself. I’ll also read or watch something related to it. Then I go to bed and call it a day. Some days, I’ll wake up and notice entire paragraphs in my head, and I’ll try to unload them longhand on a notepad as fast as I can. Other times, I’ll go for a walk and listen to an audiobook, and I’ll stop two or three times on my way to the supermarket because some sentence or word sound unblocks something in my brain that I want to capture and use. If I’m lucky, it will be related to whatever I’m working on at a given time, but it’s not always the case. Then again, to me, it’s all about being prepared to record or write those thoughts down when they come and to have them handy in some sort of archive for when I know it’s time to use them. My writing mostly happens intuitively, in spurs of realizations and associations that occur while I’m away from my desk. It’s not luck or inspiration; it’s giving my mind a clue and then letting it wander and go where it wants to go. The next stage is more structured. It starts when I already have enough big blocks of sentences written down to start molding, and that’s when I’ll sit down, transfer them to the computer, and stare at the screen until I can find the connection between those passages and build a chapter. Then, I’ll look for gaps or an entry point to the next chapter I wish to write about and do it all again.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
I don’t remember what it is like not to write. I have been writing in spiral notepads since I was little, and I have folders for seven very different books that keep forming in my mind. In many ways, my days are about transferring these books bit by bit into files as their shapes become clearer. It’s mostly a matter of finding the time and keeping up with my health so I can get to them and bring them to life while my body still can. So, I’m not sure I know what writing gives me in return because writing has been the only constant in my life. Everything else has left me or was left behind. But writing… I’m always writing. On my book launch, a dear friend gave me a cup with the saying: “You may think I am listening to you but in my head I am writing.” And I laughed as I unwrapped her gift because it’s so true. She knows me well.

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6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Not really. Not yet, anyway. It hasn’t changed how I see myself, but it has given me a sense of external confirmation that my thoughts and words are valued by someone other than me, even if this is a small number of people by now, as the book launched only a few weeks ago. There’s a gulf between having something you wrote safely kept in your drawer and printed in a stack of pages that anyone can now find in a bookstore. The distance between these two scenarios couldn’t be bigger even if the text is the same and written by you from beginning to end, and I think it’s that distance, that delta, that we, writers, are terrified of but also that we have to cross to become writers. We must jump on that water, hoping it won’t swallow us whole. Being someone who doesn’t have children doesn’t change anything about that journey. I have to keep myself afloat like everybody else. So that too hasn’t changed.
 

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
It’s early days, but one thing that friends and early beta readers mentioned is that they didn’t expect me to be so open about my childhood years and my relationship with my family. I think that because my social feed is quite private and mostly about other women, there was a sense that the book would mirror my online presence and be more of a compilation of women in history or literature and less about me or the people around me. So it’s been interesting to see the recalibration of expectations happen even though I’ve been telling people the book was a hybrid of memoir and the stories of women I interviewed all along. I guess it’s just that the feed is all many could see of my work until now, while I was working on the book for over a decade and knew where I was going with it. It seems we were looking at it from different angles all along.
 

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
In general, it is still very scarce and distorted. In books, women without children are still primarily coadjuvant characters whose role in the story is to lift or “get in the way of” protagonists who are mothers. There are also the characters that get discarded with some out-of-nowhere death soon after discovering they can’t have children (One Day by David Nicholls) or that engage in severe self-destructive behavior or dangerous behavior towards others when infertile (The Girl on the Train) or that get labeled shallow (Samantha in Sex and the City) or branded dysfunctional as soon as they dare to announce they don’t want to have children (as it happens with the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata). Very rarely, women without children are portrayed as mature, competent, reliable and in pursuit of a happy life when they choose not to have children or can’t have children. If the permanent lack of a child is mentioned in the storyline of a main character, it seems to become the main thing we will know about that woman, as if all parts of her melted away the minute she chose or was told she won’t have a child. This reductionist treatment women are subjected to in fiction can only be corrected by bringing many more positive examples of lives outside of parenthood into the literary fold. And I’m all in when it comes to taking this seriously and contributing to making it happen sooner rather than later.

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9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
Women without children are not a monolith. As I say in the introduction of my book, after interviewing 33 women from 25 countries and asking them all the questions burning in my brain about who they were, how they spent their days, time, energy, money, etc. “The answers were varied and nuanced; the people were complex and captivating. Their backgrounds, circumstances, personalities and reasons for not having children were never the same, nor were the ways they lived their lives or derived purpose and meaning. Nothing I read, saw or heard matched what had populated my mind about the paths in life that didn’t include motherhood.” And that spectrum that exists in real life is what we need to see reflected in books. Because that is what will stop the us versus them dynamic. The all mothers are this way and all women without children are that way useless debate that doesn’t take any of us anywhere.

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10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
My plan for Others Like Me is to focus on community-oriented events and share the stories I collected from all over the world with anyone who will listen. After that, I’ll go back to researching about female bodies for my second book.