In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025).

My seventh interview is with Pragya Agarwal, a writer whom I admire for her productivity, publishing a number of important books over recent years, her most memoir of which is (M)otherhood, which sits between memoir, manifesto and cultural and political comment. An important accompaniment to her campaigning, in (M)otherhood Praggya is a voice not just for herself but for many women of colour. Her writing is honest and spare and her experience of motherhood fascinating.

Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, a visiting professor at Loughborough, a Fulbright Scholar and a visiting fellow at Oxford. Besides (M)otherhood, she is the author of three other widely acclaimed non-fiction books. She was awarded a Crucible fellowship by NESTA for ‘innovative interdisciplinary research’, and a Transmission Prize in 2022 for ‘making big complex scientific ideas accessible’. Pragya also teaches writing for Irish Writers Centre and Arvon, amongst others. Born in India, and after living in the UK for 20 years, she now lives in Ireland with her family.

When and how did you realise you had to write (M)otherhood?

I had just finished writing my first book SWAY (Bloomsbury, 2020), which was not a memoir but was inspired by many of my personal experiences. Writing that book while mothering one-year old infant twins had been such an intense experience which brought up a lot of suppressed memories about my own childhood. I was also thinking a lot about ‘choice’ and the choices I have made in my life, and the choices that will be on offer to my children as they grow up. I realised that I had never really processed a lot of emotions around my reproductive decisions and choices such as abortion and my IVF treatments. As I say in (M)otherhood itself, I had always thought (mistakenly) of writing a memoir as self-indulgent and had never considered there was anything unique about my story. But I had also been doing some research on the infertility experiences of Black and brown women and had realised that there was still so much silence around this, and little data captured on the intersectionality in IVF treatments in the UK. I had a couple of ideas for my next book but knowing nothing about publishing I wasn’t sure of what would work. I then went on a writing retreat for a few days in the Welsh countryside to recover from writing and submitting SWAY, and found the time and space to think about my new idea. I realised that I really wanted to write the story of mothering and motherhood from an intersectional perspective using my own story as its spine. It all followed quickly. I submitted the first 10,000 words to a few agents and had quite an overwhelmingly positive response, which gave me courage to keep writing.

Did it feel essential that you do it? Was the need urgent? Persistent?

It must have been because I remember that within three days, I had written almost 25,000 words of what became (M)otherhood. These were not perfect words but they just flowed out, and the book was right there so clearly in front of me. This had never happened to me before. It was bought on partial submission at auction, which meant I still had to write it, which I did during lockdown while intensely mothering. This brought an immediacy and urgency to it, too.

I wouldn’t say that it was always easy writing this book because it brought up a lot of unprocessed memories that I had pushed away. But it felt urgent and essential because most – if not all – motherhood books I had seen were from a white middle-class perspective and there were so many voices missing. While this conversation is now becoming more mainstream, when I started writing this book I hadn’t seen any books discussing having children or not as a valid choice. I felt like we needed to look at reproductive choice and mothering from an intersectional perspective, and I wanted to show that our choices are shaped by context: not everyone has the same choice, of whether or not to have a child, even how to have a child, and how to mother a child. This was just before Roe v Wade got overturned but bodily autonomy already felt under threat in many places around the world. Believe it or not, when my agent sent this book out for submission, I didn’t receive many positive responses from editors. Publishers wrote that they had someone else writing about motherhood, even though their book/story was nothing like mine, and some wrote that ‘everything and so much has already been written about motherhood so not sure if there is a market for this’.

I always wanted to write a hybrid memoir which was personal and political, combining my personal story with my professional behavioural and data science expertise. I didn’t have a model for this, but knew what I wanted to do with it even though it felt unconventional at the time. And I wanted to tell my story this way and no other way. It felt rebellious, but I was thinking a lot about choice and how we exercise our choices, and what choices we are allowed to make or not, and it was crucial to exercise this choice in the face of resistance. We often believe that stories can be only told in a particular way, or there is one way to write a memoir, and I suppose it felt urgent to me to challenge that as well. I had never thought about writing a straight-forward memoir until then but the way this book appeared to me as a way of opening up a conversation, and giving space to other marginalised voices, felt right.

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

Writing our own stories takes a lot of courage. It is the combination of vulnerability and bravery in writing a memoir that really appeals to me. As the world feels heavy, sometimes all we have is our words. And when the world wants to silence our voices, writing our life stories feels like resistance. As a brown first generation immigrant twice-over, the idea of raising my head to say ‘my story matters’, especially one that is about a woman’s intimate bodily experiences which have historically been ignored in our society, felt like a bold move not just for me but for the women who came before me, and those following. This book was not as much about the mind as about the body, and bodily desires and experiences have always been classed as inferior to those that are considered more cerebral. To write about something as mundane as mothering, giving birth, not having children, wanting children, could be labelled as self-indulgent. And I was aware of how ambivalence in women is not seen as attractive. I think we need to give more room to ambivalence. And so writing (M)otherhood felt like a rebellion, which was quite attractive to me.

I also like the idea of bridging the divide across the book’s pages: for someone to read a story they might never have considered and see the rich diverse experiences in this world; or for people to see themselves in the pages of a memoir and not feel as ashamed or guilty of their own experience, not feel so alone. When we don’t hear individual stories, it is easy to dehumanise people and stereotype them into one faceless mass. This is why these stories matter so much.

Sometimes writing memoir feels like lifting the lid on taboo, and bringing it in to the open, giving it a name and a framework within which it sheds old skin and becomes easier to talk about. And sometimes writing memoir feels like letting festering wounds breathe and heal. But mostly it feels like owning your own story and finally being the narrator of your life. It is not often that we have an opportunity to do so.

Did your narrative voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into writing the book and your research?

I have always wondered about this notion of ‘my voice’ and whether I have a clear distinct voice or not. Coming from academia, especially from a scientific domain, I was taught to sideline my own voice, and never to write in the ‘I’. I could write ‘research tells us so’ but never ‘I think so’ or even worse ‘I feel so’. Academic writing operates within such a patriarchal ethnocentric framework. It took me a while to be comfortable writing in the ‘I’, to assert myself in my own writing in (M)otherhood and unlearn the academic voice coded inside me through my training. I do think that the more I wrote, the easier it became to write the way I wanted to, and the gap between the words in my head and those on the paper became smaller and smaller. I don’t often think and refine my writing very closely when I write the first draft. I like it that way, to just let the words flow the way they want to without me imposing a structure and any sort of voice on them. And the more I do this, I realise that the way I group words together, the kind of words I use, the way I repeat phrases and the rhythm of my sentences all come together to make a particular voice. Some of it goes against the normative rules of what good writing looks like, and what it should look like. But I have learnt to trust my voice, and in doing so I am also trying to dismantle the colonial ideas of writing. I have not consciously worked on developing my voice, but I have become more aware of it and also less inclined to make my voice fit a particular expectation or norm.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

I have thought about this a lot, and it is something I talk about in my life writing classes: how do we set boundaries within our stories so that we protect the people we love, and what are the ethical and privacy issues in writing about other people in our own memoirs and life stories? I set these boundaries for myself clearly from the very start in (M)otherhood, and decided on some ground rules for myself. I knew this was my story and so the other people and their stories played a secondary role, even though this sounds a bit egotistical. But it was important to me to get this very clear in my mind before I started writing, and while I was writing, and to make sure I kept the focus sharply on my own story, and my version of the story. I believed that the chronology of some events was not as crucial as the event itself. This might seem controversial, but I moved a couple of people and places around so that they wouldn’t be easily recognisable. I once attended a workshop with Rachel Cusk and was impressed by the way she interprets and observes the situations around her, placing herself into scenes where she was not there in real life for the purposes of the story. I did not do this, but it helped me think about the prickly issue of writing about other people in my memoir. I only used initials for my husband and my eldest child, and never named my twin infant children. I also was very clear that I wouldn’t be revealing more than what was necessary for the purpose of telling this story in the best way I could. One of my ground rules was that I wouldn’t write anything that my children would grow up and read and be surprised or shocked by. I think it depends on how much we care about the family members and their opinions and how much we are ok about hurting or offending anyone. But I do think setting some ground rules for ourselves before we start can be very helpful. (M)otherhood is such a personal, intimate story and I wanted to keep the focus tightly on my story and my interpretation of the situation rather than on the other people and their choices and actions, if that makes sense.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

No, I didn’t share it with anyone. My editor Hannah Knowles was the first to read (M)otherhood in its entirety. My husband refused to read the manuscript because he said that it was my story and I could tell it the way I wanted to, and he trusted me. This was very generous of him. He was also busy parenting and working. I didn’t share the book with my mother because her English is not that great, and I couldn’t share it with my father because he died while I was working on it. And in fact I removed some of the things I had written about my childhood and about him after he died because it suddenly felt worse to write about him than when he was alive. I had written about some people from my past but only in passing. There was one incident that my publishers asked me to check, but it had happened 25 years ago and I had no way of contacting the person involved (who I had not named), and didn’t know if they were dead or alive. Generally speaking, I chose not to name people, only mentioned my husband and eldest child by an initial and anonymised most others.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?   

Yes, there were difficult moments and emotions that I did not want to write about. There were things that I had never told anyone else which were now going to be out in the open for everyone to read. I had to allow myself to sit with the discomfort, to feel uncomfortable emotions. I think discomfort is quite important for creativity especially when writing memoir because it sometimes feels closer to the truth. I also shared my discomfort with the reader, inviting them into my thought process, rather than keeping them at an arm’s length. Writing (M)otherhood was interesting because I was looking inwards (and backwards) but also outwards and forwards all the time, trying to bring so many threads and themes together in a coherent narrative. This was really challenging and in some ways it allowed me the space to figure out which parts of my story I was not telling because it was not important, and which I wasn’t letting myself write about because I was myself uncomfortable about it. It was then a process of very careful editing and revising and going over everything to see where more emotional excavation was needed, and where things had to be more spare to allow for the reader to figure things out themselves and to feel part of the story too. I think in writing (M)otherhood I also realised that what we don’t write about is sometimes as important as what we do write about, and readers can make sense of the story by seeing its gaps too.

Do you write a journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

I have tried to write a journal many times over my lifetime, starting from when I was five or six years old. I always buy the nicest notebook and it goes well for a few days, but then I forget about it, and something else takes over. I go back to living life, and writing about it every day seems tedious. I have ADHD, and have come to realise that this is perhaps why I have never been able to stick with something like this. I do make copious amounts of notes on my phone though, jotting down thoughts and ideas, and observations so they are a journal of sorts but never in any sort of order or in a traditional format. I relied on my memories while writing (M)otherhood because many were surprisingly crystal clear. Our memories are often triggered when we start writing about a particular event, person or situation; I also know from scientific research that our memories are inherently unreliable. When writing memoir, we are writing a story, and while we believe it to be our truth it is really our interpretation of a particular situation. So keeping that in mind, I trusted my recollection of my story and I tried to be as honest and truthful to myself – and to the reader – as possible. There were times when what I was wearing, where I was sitting, what colour the walls were, what pictures were hanging  – details like these – were so sharp in my recollections because of the memory associated with them. But then again sometimes I could only remember the feeling I had in a particular situation, the way my body felt. The things we forget are perhaps not as important in the first place to the way we tell our story.

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

This is an interesting question and something I have thought about quite a lot. Our recollections and memories are never linear  – we remember bits and pieces from our lives. When writing (M)otherhood I tried to give some form of chronological structure to my memories, but it felt inherently artificial. I experimented with a few different appraoches to the story but in the end it made sense to write in a fractured way, emulating the way I remembered things. I think interconnections between our disparate memories can help us make sense of certain themes in our lives or make certain patterns visible. There can be aha! moments when that happens. But what is more important to me in a memoir is looking beyond the particularity of an incident or a series of events to find the universality in these experiences. Go beyond the specificity to figuring out why I care about these memories, or why anyone else should. What I am constantly thinking about is if (and how) my memories tell me or others anything about the universal human condition, and does it illuminate the human experience in any way? I suppose this is what we call the ‘stake’ in a memoir. The answer to ‘why should I care?’ is perhaps simpler. I care because these are my stories and they matter to me. But ‘why should anyone else care?’. I think people would care if I bring them into the story, and my memoir, even with all its fractured and incoherent memories, because it can be a lens for them to see their lives more clearly. That is truly empowering to me.

Do you think memoir has the power to change lives, both that of the writer and that of the reader?

Oh yes, absolutely, yes. But this change could be a whisper of something that might not shift ground but merely transforms something in the internal state of the writer or the reader. And that seems more important to me. For a writer to be believed is a huge thing; for someone to read your life and believe in your testimony, when you might have doubted yourself your whole life, is such an amazing thing. My editor Hannah was so astute and really helped me with her trust and belief in the story I was trying to write in (M)otherhood. As a reader, I suppose seeing yourself on the page can be so liberating. Since (M)otherhood was published I’ve had so many messages from so many people with whom my experiences resonated. One person left me a very tearful twenty minutes voicemail on Instagram because she was so utterly moved by it, and that made me very emotional. And that is just one example of many. I find the idea that someone would see themselves in my story and feel less alone or get inspired in some way, or change the way they live or think for the better, really moving. Writing my own story also made me take ownership of it in a way that I did not think was possible. And I was moved by it too which I realised when I was recording the audio book when I cried several times. There were times when I had an out-of-body experience as if I was reading someone else’s life story and that allowed me to feel more empathy and compassion for myself and my choices. I also believe that real change can only happen from the stories of the oppressed and marginalised, so the more we are able to write – and read – the stories of our inner states, and of our marginalisation, those that have not been traditionally centred, the more we can disrupt these hierarchies in our society that push some people to the fringes.

When we write a memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

I am not sure anything is ever really written in stone, because we can always change our mind, right? At least we should be allowed to. Because we are human after all and we evolve and grow. In (M)otherhood I tried to write about my uncertainties and ambivalences and the fluctuations in my thinking, taking the reader along with me rather than saying that I had all the answers and I had everything figured out. Because this is not the truth and if I conceal or pretend then the reader cannot trust me as a writer and I become an unreliable narrator of my own story. What I have written is never a point of no-return. It is a version of my life from this point A. But what if I get to point B and realise that I was wrong about certain things, or that I made mistakes, or that I should have written this story in a different way? That is ok too, isn’t it? I can then re-write this story from point B in a new way, tell this story with new events and situations that I might have remembered, or add in details that I might recall which the point B version of me thinks are more crucial to the story. I think having this story out in the open is only as fixed as we let it be. It is easier to believe that this is the only way to tell my story. But it is only a snapshot, never the full story. This makes writing a memoir seem flippant, which is is not. It is giving ourselves permission to change our mind, and not tormenting ourselves with how ‘real’ or true our story is. Instead, if we believe that we tell our story the best we can right now, from the perspective of the person we are today, that we bring all our biases, prejudices, trauma, everything to the story, then perhaps it will make the process of excavating our memories a bit easier, less weary, or exhausting. And maybe then we would be less scared of being vulnerable and opening up ourselves to public scrutiny. Because my lens today on my own life might be completely different to twenty years from now, as I accumulate other experiences, joys, sorrows, shed old skin, grow a new one.