Naomi Wood: On Honestly Portraying Parenthood
In this interview, author Naomi Wood discusses how her first parenthood experience helped inspire her new short story collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.
Naomi Wood is the award-winning author of three novels, including the bestselling Mrs. Hemingway. Her stories have been published in the Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, Joyland, and Stylist, and have been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, the London Magazine Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. “Comorbidities” won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. She lives in Norwich with her family and teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.
In this interview, Naomi discusses how her first parenthood experience helped inspire her new short story collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Naomi Wood
Literary agent: Sarah Fuentes and Rebecca Gradinger, UTA
Book title: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Publisher: Morrow
Release date: November 26, 2024
Genre/category: Short Stories
Previous titles: Mrs. Hemingway
Elevator pitch: A clutch of charmingly toxic women negotiate marriage, motherhood and the workplace.
What prompted you to write this book?
After becoming accidentally pregnant with my first kid, I was struck by how many women drifted toward either total negativity or total, treacly positivity. It struck me that both ends of the pole were doing some performative; that the real experience of parenthood is such a mix of positive and negative experiences, sometimes within just an hour or a minute. You can really fluctuate from joy to despair. I wanted the women in these stories to embody all aspects of this spectrum. I wanted to be honest!
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
There are nine stories here, to mimic the nine months of human gestation. I wrote the stories over the course of two years, and over the course of those two years the women became more brutal and more savage, but also more loving and kind. I took them to greater extremes.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
One of the stories (“Comorbidities”) won the 2023 BBC Short Story Award, which was something of a surprise. It then prompted other publishers and other countries to bid for the book and publish it. It was lovely.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Just how difficult short stories are, and continue to be. It’s a form I teach and my whole class is one big sympathy-tank about how beautiful and maddening the form is. We admire the short story and try and puzzle them out, but they also remain ineffable. It was a surprise, I guess, that after writing three novels, I would still find the short story so enigmatic.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope that they will see something of themselves, whether they are parents or not: something that is perhaps locked away and secret, some fantasy perhaps of following their “bad energy” and wondering where it will take them—a side of themselves that is often locked away in service to what, quite rightly, should be done. Companionship, perhaps, in dark fantasies.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I think it’s all about revision. Most of my ideas in initials drafts are messy. Writing is a very lawless place. I think you have to be OK with uncertainty, OK with the idea that through showing up and simply revising, revising, revising, it will get better. Or at least George Saunders says it will, and I believe most of everything he says.
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
