Q&A:

 What is Heavy Cream about?

Heavy Cream is the story of a 16-year-old girl living a nomadic life under the sway of her mercurial mother, until her mother suddenly vanishes, leaving her in New York City, where she falls into the orbits of three wildly different women—surrogate mothers, each intent on shaping her identity. Through them, she moves between suburban domesticity, uptown high society, and the downtown art world. Each offers refuge and a chance at reinvention. Each believes she knows what this girl needs.

At times, the novel reads like a fairy tale about escaping the fate of genetics, complete with three fairy godmothers. At others, it becomes a nightmare: Gerry is captive to women determined to impose their own visions of womanhood onto her. Like Goldilocks, she assembles a livable self by stitching together a patchwork of three incompatible models. In that sense, the novel is also a kind of comedy of manners with sharp edges, observing the rituals and performances of the worlds she moves through.

At its heart, the novel asks what happens to a girl left to fend for herself—and how she can learn to see herself when she has spent her life existing as someone else’s project. Ultimately, it’s a book about inheritance and agency: how we are shaped by the people who raise us, and how we might carry that influence without being defined by it.


Tell me about Gerry. Who is she?

Gerry tries to assemble a single mother from the three of them, each offering a different version of possibility. Still, something doesn’t fit. She’s relieved to be free of her mother, yet senses that something essential is missing. She knows she can never let her new caretakers see the dark, threadbare part of her.

Gerry is acutely aware of her own strategies—she has always had to perform to survive. She wrestles with the questions: What do I actually feel? Who am I when I’m not managing the room? How do I inhabit my own skin? Each woman offers a possible answer—until her mother returns and pulls the structure apart. Moving through these different worlds, she begins trying on identities almost like costumes—sometimes playfully, sometimes as a means of survival—until it becomes unclear what, if anything, belongs to her.

I was interested in the tension between care and harm, and in how love, ambition, and absence can coexist in the same relationships—how quickly love can become transactional.
 

Why “Heavy Cream”?

The phrase appears during one of the dramatic showdowns between mother and daughter:
“We whipped ourselves into a frenzied enthusiasm, heavy as cream, stirring up my mother’s childhood memories of her own mother’s whisked white Chantilly.”

It also comes to describe the surrogate mothers who step in to raise Gerry: too many mothers, each offering an overpowering, cloying form of nourishment. Heavy cream.


How did your own life experience inform the novel?

I write big-matriarch, female-forward books. Like Gerry, I had an unpredictable childhood, with a chaotic and turbulent mother—the most towering figure in my life, what John le Carré would call the mountain my work will eternally circle.

My mother’s commitment to her own freedom was so absolute that she was not going to let anyone clip her wings—certainly no man, and not even someone she herself had invented.

My father’s girlfriends—formidable women living entirely on their own terms, from artists to lawyers to performers—each became temporary mother figures at different moments.

Like Gerry, I had to decide what to take from each of these competing models of womanhood, and what to leave behind, in order to construct a self of my own.

Each served as a temporary mother figure at different stages of my life. I tried them all on for size, the role fitting to varying, often comical, degrees. I was like a bull in its pen, stamping my feet, ready to be a daughter whenever my father opened the gate. Sometimes I rushed forward too quickly, misjudging the distance.

The ground was always shifting beneath us. But as with Gerry, my mother was always the eye of the storm.


You’re now a mother yourself. Has this changed the way you think about these mother figures?

Becoming a mother made me more aware of how provisional and imperfect caretaking often is, how much of motherhood is not always instinctual. I understand better how overwhelming the role can be, how easy it is to fall short even with good intentions—and conversely, how the smallest, most improvised gesture is often enough.


What does Heavy Cream suggest about what a mother owes a child, and what she doesn’t?

I was interested in the tension between a mother’s responsibility to her child and her responsibility to herself. Gerry’s mother believes, almost absolutely, in a person’s right to their own life, even if that comes at a cost. The book doesn’t try to resolve that tension so much as explore it. What does a child owe the person who made her, and what does she have the right to refuse? And on the other side, what does a mother owe the life she’s created, if she also wants to remain a self in her own right?

What was the most surprising discovery you made while writing Heavy Cream?

Early on, I had conceived of the three women in great detail and was excited to be a fly on the wall in their worlds. I even wrote the line: “And, of course, there was my real mother, so far off-screen as to be barely worth mentioning.”

I thought the mother was a background detail I could dismiss—that the real story belonged to the other women. I was making the same mistake as the character. About six months in, it became clear that the mother wasn’t a corollary to the story. She was the story.

All along, Gerry fears that the polish these women offer—the paint and surface—will be stripped away by her mother’s return. She has been trying on selves, sampling identities, even as she feels a queasy sense: this isn’t who I am. If her mother returns, Gerry will be forced to reckon with the truth: this is my mother, and therefore this is who I am. The question is whether she can face her without being pulled under.


How do Gerry’s alliances with each woman shift?

Gerry believes she has these women pegged. She grows disillusioned as they either conform to or resist the roles she has assigned them. They reveal their own limited assumptions about what her life must have been like. Ultimately, she comes to see that it is hard to be human, and especially hard to be a woman—and that people are not archetypes.


What do you hope readers take away from Heavy Cream?

I hope readers come away with something of Gerry’s final understanding—that we’re all composites of our influences, that we carry our histories and our traumas, but aren’t doomed to repeat them. I’m drawn to stories that use humor as a delivery system for more difficult truths, and this book is no exception. For me, it’s ultimately about how we assemble a self from what we’re given—and what it takes to claim it as our own.