The first story in Lauren D. Woods’ new collection The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe begins with the sentence, “The shape-shifter met her husband during her horse era.” With this line, we are launched into a series of stories that are by turns whimsical and haunting, prone to flights of surreality and yet firmly, resignedly, even, rooted in real-world concerns. As characters of all ages navigate loss, heartbreak, uncertainty, and disillusionment, we’re reminded that the line between childhood and adulthood is rather flimsy, and that nobody really gets through life without carrying some of their childhood into their grown-up years.
That sounds a little precious when I say it, but Woods’ collection (her first book, and the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, judged by Kristen Arnett) is anything but. In the face of cold reality and overwhelming responsibilities, Woods’ characters cling, sometimes desperately, to different forms of escape, including self-mythologies, fantasies of an alternate life, drugs, love, and more. What we’re left with is the suggestion that storytelling and imagination are essential to survival; indeed, sometimes they’re all we have at our disposal.
Working full-time as a consultant, in addition to being a mother and stepmother, D.C.-based Woods fits in writing when she has the time, like water filling empty spaces. Many of her stories stem from her own experiences navigating single motherhood, the grief of divorce, and post-divorce dating. In her book, we regularly interact with characters who are “imperfect” mothers: women who have lost themselves in their maternal responsibilities, women who live vicariously through their children, women who navigate loneliness, grief, and desire in the wake of divorce or the death of a partner. Woods presents these characters, with curiosity and grace, rather than judgment; the effect is akin to getting a glimpse through a stranger’s window—or even turning a corner in a new friend’s home and unexpectedly finding yourself face to face with a mirror.
In this slim volume, we see children, too, wandering through the liminal space of pre-adulthood: Woods’ child heroes witness injustice, rejection, and loss; they experience the pressure of responsibilities no adult should ever have to face; and their incipient understanding of life and its cruelties is not terribly different from that of their grownup counterparts. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m every age I ever was,” Woods tells me, and, in a way, this functions as the through line connecting all of the stories in her book. Adulthood, Woods seems to be saying, is just Big Childhood.
The delight I took in these stories’ dips into surreality was matched by my delight at Woods’ experimentation with form; like a kid playing new games, Woods plays gleefully with traditional storytelling techniques: we get a story from the perspective of a wedding ring, watching itself be sold. Another in the form of a multiple-choice quiz, helping the reader identify a witch (hint: if a woman is older, lives alone, and is happily unmarried, she may be a witch).
I reached out to Woods to discover more about her experience creating this collection, her relationship to writing, her thoughts on the importance of imagination as we age, and more:
Q: When did you start writing?
Woods: I started keeping journals at age thirteen and never stopped, but I started seriously with fiction over fifteen years ago when I was living alone in Egypt for a period, working for the State Department. I didn’t have any friends there yet, but I had a big apartment with a giant wooden dining table. And there was something romantic about a new country, an empty apartment, and no belongings that made me want to sit with myself and try out fiction, and so I did.
Q: Can you tell us about the process for writing The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe? Did you set out to write this collection, or did it sort of come together by happenstance?
Woods: I was definitely not writing toward a collection. I wrote these stories on the side while I was working on novels. I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular with them. I was amusing myself and feeling my feelings, and so there’s this sort of playful quality that often runs throughout that I don’t think I could have captured if I had been taking myself seriously. It was only years later, when I told my husband I had a graveyard of incomplete stories, and he encouraged me to send them out to literary magazines and then to collect them into a manuscript that I realized I already had a whole book within my files.
Q: The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe deals with complex themes of loss, longing, and resignation, but in these stories, there is also great tenderness and compassion. Do you see yourself or your life in the narratives you’ve weaved? Are any inspired by real life?
Woods: Yes, although it’s fiction, there are a lot of emotional truths here. I wrote these stories over a long period, but the majority were written shortly after my divorce and the end of my first post-divorce relationship, while I was raising young kids and feeling sorry for myself, but also loving these little beings I was so lucky to have in my life. So I was drawing a lot from my own life in thinking about the ends of relationships, and parenting young kids, and how to make sense of it all.
Q: Throughout this collection, characters escape—literally or figuratively—from their everyday lives. What roles do you see imagination and make-believe playing in your own life? Do you think these are essential tools for survival?
Woods: Yes! I am obsessed with the idea of escape and didn’t realize it until I wrote this collection and thought Wow, that’s in every story. I do believe you have to imagine your way out of a situation before you can arrive there. I remember, for some reason, this life-changing moment in high school, where I was in this awful math class with a teacher I couldn’t seem to connect with, and I just walked out of that class, and got in my car, and started driving. And ever since then, I’ve thought to myself, You know what? You’re a free person. If something ever makes you feel truly terrible inside, you should try to fix it, but if you can’t, you’re always free to leave.
Q: What is your relationship to fairytales and/or the surreal? What role do you think fairytales, folktales, and mythology play in our lives both as children and adults?
Woods: I tend to turn to the surreal for more difficult stories, when I don’t know how to tell a story straight. For example, the first story of my collection, “The Shapeshifter,” is about a woman who changes herself for the men around her. That one does have some spiritual truth, as I feel like I’ve done that when I’m at my worst. It feels terrible to think about, but using a metaphor of animals instead feels fun, kind of like how you joke with your friends about the terrible things you’ve been through. So often when I think about the surreal or fairytales, I’m trying to write about something serious in a new way.
Q: In many of your stories, the lines between childhood and adulthood blur and bend in compelling and even tragic ways. Can you speak a little to this idea?
Woods: Yes, I really love the compression of time. Sometimes, I feel like I’m every age I ever was. I feel my childhood so acutely, maybe because I journaled through it, and maybe because your emotions are so strong in childhood. I love thinking about why we are the way we are as adults, and much of it has to do with the particular ways that our childhoods formed us.
Q: Gender roles and expectations are recurring themes throughout many of these stories. How do you see yourself engaging with these subjects?
Woods: When I was a teenager growing up in Texas, I was obsessed with the idea that I was never going to embrace traditional gender roles, which I saw as very limiting. I still see the world partially that way, but it’s complicated and more nuanced now that I’m a mother, and I’m less interested in a gender analysis of my life and more interested in how to balance my life to be present for everyone I love, including myself. I’m honestly more curious these days, like how do mothers balance it all, but also how do fathers, because it’s tough for all of us.
Q: Many of the characters in this book are mothers, undergoing the complicated feelings and divided sense of self that often accompany motherhood. How does your own experience of motherhood compare to or diverge from the experiences of the characters in your book?
Woods: I’m definitely writing from some spiritual truths here. I love my children deeply, even as I often feel I’m not equipped to be exactly the mother I’d like to be. I love living in abstraction, and thinking about books and the world and big ideas, but I’m also living in a world where the kids are going to interrupt me every few minutes to ask me where a phone charger is, or can I sign them into an account so they can play Minecraft, or somebody is hungry again. I’m always thinking about the tension between being a writer and mother, and so my characters are too.
Q: A number of these stories counter societal assumptions that mothers should be these perfect and perfectly loving figures—that they shouldn’t have their own lives or long for space from their children at times. What was it like writing these stories about what motherhood is really like for many people? What was it like sharing them with the world?
Woods: I hope I’ve managed to balance the tenderness I feel for my kids alongside the honest depictions of the sacrifices. My own mother is one of those rare people who excelled at motherhood and never complained, but I’m not saintly like her. I’m just a regular person who sometimes complains and gets frustrated, and that probably comes out in my characters too. I think the kids will understand it if they read these someday. They have great senses of humor, and we joke about how crazy they are sometimes.
Q: Did writing this book change you in any ways?
Woods: I learned a lot about myself. I kept writing what I thought were very different stories, and they kept having these similar themes. When you finish a book, you get a lot of distance, and then you read it, and you’re like, wow, this author is really obsessed with escape, or nonconformity, or the ends of relationships, in a way that you just really can’t see when you’re close to it. It was surprising.
Q: Do you have a favorite story in this collection?
Woods: Yes, “Evening by the Lake.” It’s a totally fictional story, but I was also in a relationship with someone who passed away a few years ago, and I’m haunted by it. So this story allowed me to feel those haunted feelings, but from the perspective of a child who is not the character in the relationship.
Q: Who are your literary inspirations?
Woods: Alice Munro was my first inspiration for writing short stories. I discovered her browsing bookstores in college and never looked back. And though I read her differently now because of some revelations about her past, she was one of my first influences, for her nostalgic looks at girlhood. I love Grace Paley for her punchy, smart writing. I thought a lot about surrealism after reading Steven Millhauser. I also read some Michael Cunningham stories when I was getting started that really captured me. I guess I love a lot of writers who are also older, less contemporary writers, although I love a lot of people who are writing right now too.
Q: Do you have any other projects you’re currently working on that you can tell us about?
Woods: I recently finished another short story collection that leans heavily into absurdism. I’m also working on a funny novel about motherhood in suburban DC.
Q: Are there any questions you wish someone would ask you about your writing?
Woods: I’m sometimes asked about what it’s like to be married to another writer, and it’s great. I met my husband Andrew Bertaina when we were both divorced, parenting two young kids each, and publishing in similar places. Now that we’re together, we don’t critique each other’s work or anything, but we do run a local literary salon together and enjoy reading a lot of the same things, and it’s lovely to have a partner to vibe with on similar things.
