Interview with Nicole Louie on Others Like Me - Part 1

Nicole Louie knew she did not want to have children. But she had no idea what a life without children looked like. The only stories she heard growing up in Brazil were about eccentric aunts, crazy cat ladies and pitiful barren women. Others Like Me gathers the stories of 14 women from around the world who decide -for a variety of reasons - not to become mothers. It is also a luminous memoir of love, reconciliation and self-acceptance. In Part One of this series, Louie shares how her interviews with the women changed her perceptions of what women can give each other. We also talk about the myriad ways to nurture, JD Vance, and the legacy of women.

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Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie
Anansi International
364 pages

DBN: Besides being a survey of women from around the world who have decided not to have children, Others Like Me constitutes a classically beautiful memoir. It’s a fantastic book. You could be a novelist. I cried like a baby at the end. I felt so involved with your life and so involved with your experience. What were you hoping for readers like me to feel? What kind of relationship did you want to develop with us?

NL: To be honest, one of the biggest surprises of my life was to realize I was going to be in the book. I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I started thinking about the book in 2009 because I could not visualize the lives of women without children. I decided I was going to go and find them. That was the goal. That was the mission. I was going to go find those stories and maybe edit an anthology. I could give them to the world. Like, “Hey! I found these stories. Maybe you don’t have to feel as alone as I did when I didn’t have them.”

I never imagined I would dedicate 14 years of my life to a book. It’s very scary. The longer you work on it, the more it matters; the more you want it to be good; the more you think it’s not going to be as good because your expectations are already so high. And the accumulations of these stories - the sense of responsibility - meant there was another woman in the world who was thinking, “When is this book coming out?!” I finished the bibliographic work in 2012. And I interviewed 33 women. You only have 14 in the book.

Then I had five to six years of interviews.  It was while I was doing the interviews that I thought, “Oh God! I’m going to be in this book!” The realization came from the impact the interviews were having on me. The women were becoming friends, advisors, and sisters in a way.  In the book, I mention one of the women, Candace, holding me after my divorce. And we were strangers! That changes you as a person. It changes your perception of what women can give to each other. And how bigger and broader we are than we are portrayed. And that nurturing doesn’t have to be vertical towards a human we gave birth to. We can nurture each other; that verticality can also be somebody who’s older than you nurturing you. Not as a mother – as a mentor, as a wise woman. I thought, I have all of these revelations and insights and if I don’t put my voice in the book, how will I include them? I started writing in 2009. But I wrote the first chapter about myself around 2018.

DBN: Others Like Me seems like an obvious title. Still, can you talk about it?                  

NL: It wasn’t this title for the longest time. The title that I chose first was Empty Uterus. It was the title of the blog I started in 2009 when I began researching this topic. But people found that title very blunt and very sad and very harsh.  To be honest, I still like it very much. But I also understood - by meeting women who could not have kids - that for them Empty Uterus read in a very different way. Once you decide to include stories that are very different than yours - that don’t involve choice - you have to be careful.

DBN: In your introduction you talk about falling fertility rates and the idea that at no time in the history of women was motherhood necessarily a given. If that’s the case, why do we hold so firmly to that assumption?

NL: Because we don’t see the stories. It’s about invisibility. When we do see stories about women without children they are distorted, or the women are vilified. It is the crazy aunt who lives on a farm faraway and visits once a year at Christmas, making everyone uncomfortable. Or the eccentric aunt who smokes weed.

DBN: Is it really, though? I’m just trying to think. I had teachers who were single and didn’t have children and a couple of aunts who weren’t married. And of course, there were the nuns... I don’t know.

NL: There is the assumption that unmarried women couldn’t find a husband even though you don’t really know the story: Maybe she chose not to have a husband. And if she has a husband and she doesn’t have a child, people think she must be barren; she must be infertile… Of course, these women were never the cool ones. They were always the sad ones who could not have the life that the other women had.

Growing up in Brazil and studying at Catholic schools, there was always this binary: We are taught to be mothers. But the ones who are teaching us don’t have children. It was so stark to me. I talk about Sister Bettina early in the book, who everyday read us a Biblical story about mothers, but didn’t have any kids. Oh but  “they are married to Jesus.” I think it is very convenient to be married to a husband who is never there yet expect us to be married to a man who will be there.

DBN: I take your point. This next question is a little off topic. I wondered what you thought about Republican J.D. Vance’s comment that it was selfish for women not to have children.

NL: The BBC contacted me to ask if I would like to comment on Vance. And I said, “Actually, yes I would.” I said something about how the value of our lives are basically calculated on the lack of the presence of this other person who is our child. The whole concept of being selfish towards a human being who doesn’t exist is so alien to me. Who am I being selfish towards? From a logic perspective, that makes no sense.

Rebecca Solnit has this beautiful quote: “There are so many more ways to love. So many more ways to exist in this world.” And I always think about her when I think about this: It cannot be that our only legacy in the world as women is to give birth.

Part One of my interview with Nicole Louie took place over Zoom on November 1, 2024. Part Two coming soon.