I don’t want to be the mom rage lady. But this feels bigger than me: An Interview with Minna Dubin

Minna Dubin, a writer, workshop facilitator, and public artist in Berkeley, California, has published writing on motherhood and identity in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Salon, Lit Hub, Parents, The Forward, Hobart, and Mutha Magazine. The recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she has been awarded writing residencies at InCahoots, WordSpace Studios, Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Hopscotch House, and Lacawac Sanctuary. In 2019 and 2020 Minna’s essays in The New York Times, “The Rage Mother’s Don’t Talk About” and “‘I Am Going to Physically Explode’: Mom Rage in a Pandemic,” sparked international conversations about motherhood. Minna has since appeared on MSNBC, Good Morning America, The Tamron Hall Show, NBC10 Boston, the BBC, and NPR as a leading feminist voice on mom rage. We met over Zoom in July to discuss her debut book MOM RAGE: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood, published in September 2023.

Ashlee Laielli: First, I’m so curious, how has it felt to be immersed in this topic so deeply for so long—through living, writing, and research, and then talking about it in interviews, becoming this public voice for mom rage?

Minna Dubin: I mean, that was my initial hesitation about writing this book. “I don’t want to be the mom rage lady.” But this feels bigger than me. It feels like somebody has to do this, and I can do it. It’s also cathartic. It’s good for me, in my own brain and life, to talk about these issues. It brings up a sort of mindfulness for me in terms of my own emotional storm. It’s good that it feels like a broader issue around the way that the world cares for mothers, and around oppression and not just about me, because mom rage doesn’t feel like such a constant anymore in my life. The book would feel outdated if it was solely a memoir.

AL: That leads right into my next question. How did you decide to do a thematic nonfiction book, as opposed to a traditional memoir or an essay collection?

MD: If I did it as a memoir, I think it would be written off as, “Oh, this is a crazy lady who has anger issues,” which is exactly how moms write themselves off. I needed it to be taken seriously, so I needed the social critique piece, the statistics, and then other mom stories from around the world to show how this is an international problem. I wanted this topic to be taken seriously.

AL: Thinking back to your work with MomLists, and the way you invited other mothers to participate, I’m wondering, have you always involved collaboration as a part of your writing practice?

MD: I used to do a lot more performance. I used to do monologues. Performances have an audience and create a conversation. The idea of one person’s story having the possibility of social transformation has always been important to me. Whether it’s doing monologues and having an audience, or doing MomLists and putting them up so that people can read them, or inviting guests to do their own, or interviewing people on mom rage, there is some way that I want community in my work. I’m pretty extroverted and I do better work when I’m bouncing things off people.

AL: Speaking of audience, while reading Mom Rage I wondered how you thought of your audience for this project. How much were you imagining and anticipating the reader while writing and revising?

I wrote this book with the intention for mothers to read it, and for them to feel relief, to give themselves a moment of forgiveness, and to help mothers who don’t see the broader social structures that we’re a part of.

MD: Mothers in general were my audience. I wrote this book with the intention for mothers to read it, and for them to feel relief, to give themselves a moment of forgiveness, and to help mothers who don’t see the broader social structures that we’re a part of. This was really for moms. In my biggest fantasy, fathers also read this book so that they can better understand the moms in their lives. That feels like a tall order to get dads to read a book called Mom Rage.

AL: In the book, you write about art as something mothers have to reclaim and re-cultivate, how we have to carve out spaces for ourselves and be conscious and intentional about our identities. In your case, and in mine as well, the art is engaging with the experience of motherhood. I really love how, instead of managing these different compartments of our lives and personhood, the process of making art rooted in motherhood shifts what it means to be a mother. For me, it takes the “mother” identity out of its box. Mothering is a very creative and philosophical endeavor that generates a lot of value and knowledge, but it’s not really thought of that way in our culture, right? How do art and motherhood interact or coexist in your life?

MD: When I first became a mom, I stopped making art for a while because all my creative energy was going into mothering. It felt like a conscious choice to reclaim it. I started doing this thing called an Artist Residency in Motherhood, created by Lenka Clayton, who’s an artist. There’s a Facebook group for it, and mother-artists all over the world are part of it. Basically, you make yourself a proposal of what you’re going to do, you do it, and you can post about it. Nobody is tracking you. It’s this way of creating a brain shift of thinking about art as being part of motherhood and motherhood as being part of art. The separation doesn’t have to exist. A lot of the moms use their kids in their art, or the kids are making art with them. I am not doing that. Even though my art is about my life and my kids and my family, it feels like a separate endeavor. I don’t write with them, but I want to share it with them. I’m excited that they know this is happening. They’re excited. I’m taking them out of school and bringing them on the book tour to New York, Philly, and New Jersey.

AL: It’s so important for them to see their mom on stage! That’s awesome. Your art is very entangled, I’d say, with activism and advocacy. Was that always a part of how you thought about being a writer, and your work as a writer? How are you navigating this balance between artist and advocate?

My memoir writing has always looked at social structures of power and oppression and how they affect the tiny, everyday moments of our lives and our relationships. When I became a mother, the identity of mother really took over and that became the identity I was examining.

MD: I ran a panel for AWP last year about memoir and activism. Originally, when I started writing memoir, it was about identity issues. I was telling stories of my life, but looking at them through how race, class, gender, and sexuality were affecting the story. My memoir writing has always looked at social structures of power and oppression and how they affect the tiny, everyday moments of our lives and our relationships. When I became a mother, the identity of mother really took over and that became the identity I was examining. In it is race, class, gender, sexuality, and body. I’m not thinking with a conscious activist agenda. I’m just trying to name what I see and to make sense of my experience. I see the social structures that are impacting me and moms. It feels important to name it, because our experience is greatly affected by it, and it can be very under-the-surface if we don’t name it.

AL: Right in the beginning of Mom Rage you write, “I see mom rage as an understandable reaction (albeit not good for anyone) to oppressive cultural circumstances.” Did you set out with this hypothesis about mom rage? When did you arrive at this understanding?

MD: I think I set out with that when I started writing this book. It was the only way that I felt like I could write. This book was through that lens. When I wrote the first essay “The Rage Mothers Don’t Talk About” for The New York Times I don’t think it had any social overlay awareness at that point about mom rage. Once I posted that essay and started getting all these messages from moms, I began to realize, this isn’t just me, something’s happening here. Then began years of interviews and research.

AL: How many years have you been working on this?

MD: I published that [essay in The New York Times] in 2019. So basically since then, because that’s when the emails started. It wasn’t on purpose, but those emails were part of the research. Less than a year later I had the July 2020 “‘I Am Going to Physically Explode’: Mom Rage in a Pandemic” article in The New York Times. By that point there was a social overlay to my thinking. That year of getting emails from moms and then having the pandemic hit made me realize that this is bigger than me.

AL: I see you on social media sharing the work of other people writing about this topic now. Do you feel that in the time you’ve been doing this it’s started to have its moment? Is there a conversation happening now that was lacking when you were first experiencing this?

MD: Yes, there was no conversation happening. Anne Lamott had that amazing piece in Salon in 1998 about mother rage, but if it spurred a conversation, I don’t know, because I wasn’t a mom then. I was seventeen years old. By the time I was a mom who wrote and had that piece published in 2019, I was not hearing any conversation about this topic. Now it feels like the term “mom rage” has become commonplace. The topic is being published from India to Ireland and that feels exciting to me, to have been part of this large international cultural change feels really exciting. It has been very cool to see a culture-wide shift of thinking.

AL: Can you talk about the power of naming things in terms of “mom rage”?

MD: When I was in college, I was an intern for Eve Ensler when she was still doing The Vagina Monologues. So, The Vagina Monologues greatly influenced me. I was a monologist then, and I remember Eve talking about how, after the shows, women would come up to her to tell her their stories, to confide in her. She opened something up for people, and I really feel that experience with this topic. I’ll talk to some person in their seventies, like my mom’s friend, and she’ll tell me her story about mom rage, and then she’ll go talk to her friend about the book, and her friend will tell her her story, and neither of them had ever told anyone their mom rage story before in their life. It’s so cool. People want to tell their mom rage stories and just have never been asked to talk about it.

AL: The book had me thinking about anger versus rage. I love the way this book embraces righteous anger and redirects our anger at its rightful targets, encouraging us to harness it into advocating for a world that better supports women, mothers, and families. One thing you mention is that therapy is not for everyone, for cultural and economic reasons, and I was thinking about how community organizing and community involvement is such a constructive way for many people to cope with a lot of these issues. Was this something that came up much for anyone you interviewed?Community is a direct amelioration mechanism for mom rage.

Community is a direct amelioration mechanism for mom rage. Community is one of the answers, especially in a culture that doesn’t offer systems that help us. All we really have is each other.

MD: Yeah, I mean, the most common thing that the moms I talked to were doing to support themselves with their mom rage was probably therapy. Everyone had different methods. One of the moms in Australia is a theater artist and so she makes work around this topic. I had a mom who talked about creating her own mom group around this. I interviewed this mom in Canada who is in a polyamorous relationship, and she talked about the ways that her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s wife, and the boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend really became a little family, and the ways they would support each other. It was her community. They would help pick up her kids, or be together for meals. I think community didn’t come up in my interviews often because almost all the moms I interviewed were struggling with mom rage.  Community is a direct amelioration mechanism for mom rage. Community is one of the answers, especially in a culture that doesn’t offer systems that help us. All we really have is each other.

AL: The ending couldn’t possibly be more perfect. How did that come about? When in the process did you decide on this ending?

MD: I am not a very good planner in my writing. I don’t chart things. I just write, and then I edit and edit. I struggled with how to end this book. There’s no ending to mom rage without a tear-down of the patriarchy, which is how I ended the book in the first draft. I was basically calling for a full societal revolution. I still think that’s needed. But I also wanted to take care of my reader, give a sense of closure. I needed to bring the book back to a single story. Back to the everyday mother. Back to my story, since my story is the throughline. I think it was the third draft when I wrote what is now the ending of the book, which is a text exchange I had with a mom friend. I finished that section and I just cried and cried. I was like, “Well, I think I finished my book.” I don’t want to spoil it, but basically in that text exchange, my mom friend is mothering me. And as I typed out her words to close the chapter, I was mothering myself. And as my readers read those words, I’m mothering them. That was my goal over anything else with this book, to take care of mothers.