Date of Award

Spring 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

Creative Writing

Committee Director

Marianne Chan

Committee Member

Remica Bingham-Risher

Committee Member

Luisa A. Igloria

Committee Member

Molly McCully Brown

Abstract

This Changes Everything is a bildungsroman of motherhood, explored as a memoir-in-essays. The collection focuses on the universal rites of passage each parent experiences, and the unique way these shared milestones – the sticker shock that comes when realizing American childcare is unaffordable, the first time you lose a child, the first time your child is sick and you cannot heal them, the last time your last baby sleeps in a crib – shaped my own life.

Motherhood as a claimed identity is an organizing principle of the collection, and the essays move chronologically through my life as a newly pregnant woman to a young mother of two. Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, and Rachel Cusk’s classic A Life’s Work are foundational texts for what I hope to achieve, and I am continually inspired by the way writers Camille T. Dungy, Louise Erdrich and Kate Baer render the intricacies and complexities and joy of motherhood on the page

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/m6qx-4d14

ISBN

9798382770789

Available for download on Thursday, June 11, 2026

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