How I Turned My Personal Story Into a Universal One To Sell My Book: Ruthie Ackerman
Another story about never writing for market trends, even when you hit a market trend
My Q&A series “How I Did X” is back! For a few years, I had an interview series with writers about writerly things like breaking into The New Yorker, publishing books without an agent, and (of course) getting an agent. Why did I ever stop? To be honest, as much as I loved talking to fellow writers, they didn’t seem to be very popular. Boy, was I wrong! Now that I have STATS, it turns out that the interview series is beloved by views if not by comments or hearts. So I’m bringing it back! And I’m widening the scope even more by talking to all sorts of artists and adults who are doing life a little differently than the conventional path.
I am able to take the time to set up and conduct these interviews thanks to the support of my subscribers. If you enjoy them, please consider upgrading your subscription. Subscriptions help me cover the cost of transcription services and the care I take in preparing them.
This month, I talked to Ruthie Ackerman, one of my talented classmates from StoryStudio’s Essay-Collection-in-a-Year workshop. Ruthie is the author of The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us and the founder of the Ignite Writers Collective. Her writing has been published in Vogue, Glamour, TIME, and Oprah Daily, not to mention her Modern Love essay in the NYT. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Ruthie Ackerman had long believed that the decision to not have children was a radical act. She’d grown up being told that she came from a long line of women who had abandoned their kids and feared she would pass on her half-brother’s rare genetic disorder. So when she marries a man who doesn’t want children, she hopes she can be happy without any. But a voice in her head keeps returning to the question: What if mothering can be a radical act too? When her marriage veers off course, she goes searching through the twists and turns of her DNA to decide once and for all whether she should become a mother.
By the time Ruthie finally determines that she desperately wants a child, she learns that motherhood won’t happen the way she thought it would. Now she must enter the hall of mirrors where biology, genetics, and philosophy collide as she wonders what it means to both create and nurture a life. What does inheritance really entail? What does it mean to be a “good” mother? When it comes down to it, how important is nature versus nurture? And where are the models for what a “good life” can look like for women, both with and without children?
Synthesizing reportage and memoir, The Mother Code unravels how we’ve come to understand the institution of motherhood. What emerges is a groundbreaking new vision for what it means to parent: a mother code that goes beyond our bloodlines and genetics and instead urges us to embrace inheritance as the legacy we want to leave behind for those we love.
What can we learn from Ruthie? A few notes:
Be patient with the story, especially when it comes to personal narrative (though I suppose this applies to fiction too). Sometimes you have to wait for the ending to come to you to know what project you have in your hands.
Feeling stuck? Play around with structure. How does the story shift if you use another starting point for your narrative?
Take notes on anything you think you may want to write about later, even if you don’t know what that is yet. I love the idea of using life as your own research project.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the things that struck me about your book was that a lot of the events in it are fairly recent. Your pregnancy and the birth of your child happened during the pandemic. You mention Roe v. Wade being struck down. When did you feel that this experience had to be a book? It seems like the urgency was there right away, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I had thought about writing this story when I froze my eggs when I was 35, which was in 2013. That experience of freezing my eggs, and knowing I wasn't sure if I wanted a kid and my husband and I were on different pages, was a central tension of the narrative. I also couldn’t tell if I really wanted a child or I just wanted one because society told me that’s what I should desire. All of that was brewing as I wrote. At the time, there was a place in the middle of the book that I couldn't get past that was sagging and now that I've written this version, I realized I couldn't see my way to the end of the book because I was still living it. The aha moment wasn't my child being born, me thinking this has to be a book, and scrambling to write it. Once she was born, I saw my way to the ending.
Once you saw the ending, where were you in the process? In other words, what came first: the manuscript or the book proposal?
I had to write enough of the manuscript to be able to see my way into the proposal. The point when that started to happen was when my daughter Clementine was three months old. I woke up in this fever dream knowing how this book needed to start, which is the moment where I introduced my daughter to my half-brother. I woke up with the realization that that was the opening of the book, which as you know, did not become the opening. I just started writing and a year later I had the proposal done. So, it took a full year even once I knew where the beginning of the book was to get my proposal on the page.
What was the experience of writing that proposal?
The proposal process is such a beast. I wish I had some magic wand, or someone would listen to me from on high in the publishing world, because I really think the proposal process is an obstacle course that sends writers through these hoops that are totally unnecessary to the actual writing process of the book. But I get that the acquiring editor needs to know that you've thought through the book. The process of writing the proposal was so much harder than writing the book because in writing the book, I stumbled and meandered my way through on the page and figured out what I was saying as I went. Whereas you have to pretend or promise that you understand where you're going in a proposal. And it's such a weird thing because of course you don't know what you're writing because you haven't written it.
How deep did you go into research for the proposal or was that something that you promised you would do?
I wrote this proposal as a straight memoir. I knew I was going to bring in some research, but I didn't exactly know where it was going to go or what it would be. We went out to 39 acquiring editors, from the Big Five to small indies, and got 37 rejections. One of the two editors that was interested was Jamia Wilson, the executive editor at Random House, who asked me to add more memoir plus. So at that point I needed to know that I was trying to integrate the cultural, scientific, and financial questions. We sold the book on that two page memo I wrote. But what that meant was that when I sat down to actually write the book, I had this memo that explained at a high level what I was trying to do, but I hadn’t written any of the book yet.
Since you mentioned your agent, when did they come into the process?
I already had an agent. I had a book that I had sold prior to this one that never ended up coming out. It was a total fiasco. I already had this agent, but when I talk to clients who are trying to query agents, I tell them that I don't think you need a full manuscript, but you need enough of a manuscript to have a strong idea of what you're trying to say so that you can write a proposal that's really going to hook an agent.
In my case, I had my agent from the beginning to bounce ideas off of, but I had to really believe in this book idea. In 2019, I published a Modern Love essay. When that came out, I was so sure that my agent was going to say, “Now we can sell a book.” But when I had my meeting with her, she said no one wanted fertility and motherhood books. And I was taken aback because, in my mind, it was never supposed to be a fertility or a motherhood book. It was supposed to be a book about a woman's life that veers off course. Motherhood and fertility are a part of that, but it was not the full shebang.
She asked me to show her my vision. I had to go back and have faith in the project and believe that I could make this into something that was not a motherhood or a fertility book. She and I worked on it together once I had the vision and she could see what I meant. We still worked on it for another year together until the fall of 2022 and then she sold it.
I'm sure in 2019 it seemed like no one wanted to read about this, but now it's 2025 and I see so many books about motherhood. Goes to show that you can't ever predict what's going to happen in the market, so you should write the book you want to write anyway.
That is exactly right. I wanted my book to come out last year because I finished it in 2023 but because of the election, Random House decided it wasn't a good time to publish. But now that it's coming out at this exact moment, I realize this is the moment that the book was meant to come out. I look at the proposals for baby bonuses and the federal government trying to incentivize women to have children, and I think my book really has a lot to say about that. My message is that if we want women to have children, what we need is to show women that their sense of self-actualization is just as important as whether or not they become mothers. The idea that women are only worthy if they get married and have children is the opposite of what incentivizes women. I know for myself, I would've had a child sooner if I knew that I could be a self-actualized human and a mother. I think the fact that the book is coming out right now is great because we're having these conversations more and more.
I am someone who chose not to have children and I am happy and at peace with that decision. It was less fraught for me than your own journey towards deciding to have a child. But I identified with that fear of either being a mom or being a self-actualized human. I think that is the big binary, and a false one, that a lot of women struggle. I appreciated that about your book.
I'm glad to hear that because my worry is that women who don't have children or people that don't want children won’t think it’s a book for them. But I think of it as a book for anyone who's deciding or even not deciding, but just living in a world where the expectation is that female-bodied people will bear children. I also want communities of people that are childfree or other self-identified communities to also feel like they could see themselves in the book.
How did you meld the proposal and the memo? How did you get to that final draft?
A deadline and a sense of fear are good motivators. My editor told me to send her an outline of my whole book. I had a month to send it. I was so scared to tell her that I had no idea what the outline for my book was. I created one and bulleted out what each chapter was going to be. We got on the phone and had a two-hour call where she said she loved what's on the page, but the scene with my brother on the Zoom call was not the beginning. She said the beginning was actually the moment in the bookstore when I ran into my ex-husband, pregnant. It changed how I saw the book. At the end of that call, she said she wanted 50 pages by April. I couldn't imagine how I was going to get 50 pages done. But once I had that flip of the switch of the structure, it just flowed.
It flowed until I got to chapter nine. I remember hitting the speed bump and having no idea what the hypothesis or takeaway of the book was. I left chapter nine as a gaping hole in the manuscript and went to chapter 10 and kept writing. In the second draft, it started to come together more. All of this to say, I had no idea what I was trying to say. I only figured out what I was trying to say through the writing.
You weave research into your personal experience, but your pregnancy itself was a research project for you. We see you talking to different experts almost every step of the way, and not just fertility doctors. You talk to people who have written about reproduction, about DNA, about pregnancies in animals and so on. You needed those answers to clarify your own concerns, but did you also record the conversations for posterity?
I took notes on all those calls. I figured from being a writer that I was going to write something someday, whether it was an essay or a book. When I figured out that I was writing a book, I knew that I wanted it to not feel like a mash up of my personal story and research. I've seen books that feel that way. The craft of it was folding in this research and these interviews so that the reader is getting all this information through my own lens. That was really the biggest struggle for me.
There was a lot of fast news coming out about women's reproductive rights while you were writing this and there are new scientific developments happening all the time. At what point did you decide you couldn’t keep updating that part of the manuscript?
I remember updating vice presidential contender JD Vance to Vice President JD Vance in my final edit. I was watching the Alabama IVF ruling very closely and incorporating any changes into the manuscript. I was doing that up until the very end. I don’t remember when final edits were due, but fairly recently.
How are you preparing for the book launch?
I think this is the moment where I'm freaking out because I didn't do a zillion things that maybe I should have done. Then again, I've been working on this for so long and I have a team of people from Random House and outside people working on it too. I know I have done everything I can, but I still have this feeling of missing something. When I feel out of control, I cling to the things that I can control. I've been very focused on book tour outfits. Which clothes should I wear? I painted tiny chromosomes on my nails to match my book cover. Very important stuff. Because that seems like something I can control right now.
That’s awesome that you're going on a book tour.
I'm very excited. One of the things I imagined in this glamorous way is having your publisher send you on a book tour. That is not what happens (laughs). You have to pay for it yourself. You have to handle all the logistics. But there’s nothing like being in a room with a bunch of people talking about ideas that you’ve spent years writing about. Book tour is what makes the whole project of writing a book worthwhile.
To learn more about Ruthie, visit her website, follow her on Instagram and/or subscribe to her newsletter. If you live in Boston, Washington DC, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Chicago or Ann Arbor you can say hi to her on her book tour!
Further Reading
Ruthie’s Modern Love Essay about the questionable promise of fertility preservation.
One of the memoirs Ruthie read to help her figure out her own was The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease by Daisy Hernández. It’s been on my to-read list foreeever.
I’m not a mom but I love busting some myths about motherhood, including the one about motherhood as a path to self-improvement.
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LGSNQ: Gentrification & Preservation in a Chicago Neighborhood (co-author)
Desolación by Gabriela Mistral (co-translator)
My most recent writing:
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This was such a fantastic (and fun!) interview! Thank you so much, Ines!!
I love these. Sorry I never commented.