If you’re as addicted to the internet as I am, you’re probably familiar with #TradWives donning aprons, baking cookies, bragging about being housewives, raising kids, and feeding husbands. Or, for the less chronically online, perhaps #BossQueens rings a bell—the ladies leading multinationals and laying off workers, all while packing their kids’ wagyu sando lunches and dropping them off at their $90,000/year kindergartens. Though these trends speak to radically different visions of American identity, they share a fundamental premise: Central to happy, meaningful lives are familial responsibilities and duties.

Against this backdrop, I found myself devouring Szilvia Molnar’s addictive and disturbing debut, The Nursery. The novel paints a grim portrait of parenthood and family, stripped of both the #TradWives’ 1950s patriarchal cosplay, and the #BossQueens’ have-it-all corporate delusions. The Nursery follows a new mother, nicknamed Miffo: a Swedish translator sinking into the abyss of postpartum depression, imprisoned in her apartment, daydreaming about harming her newborn daughter in increasingly violent ways. It’s an immersive, often darkly comedic work—one that feels as intimate as a journal, and classically Nordic in its gloomy conclusions about the human condition.

Naturally, most of the coverage surrounding The Nursery focuses on its unvarnished, sometimes brutal portrayal of the early days of motherhood; the blood, pain, and trauma of childbirth (and its aftermath) are rendered raw, with a photojournalist’s attention to detail. And while it’s refreshing to see motherhood stripped of its modern accouterments (explosive gender reveal parties and $3,000 Fendi bassinets), I also read the novel as a warning to artists about the sacrifices of fitting ourselves into traditional families. As curator of the reading series Casual Encountersz, I’m steeped in a milieu of writers and poets fleeing the trappings of polite society: obligations, partners, children. The part of The Nursery that resonated with me was its suggestion that the nuclear family—rather than being a source of creativity or unconditional love or empathy, as is typically assumed—can instead result in alienation. It may be anecdotal, but this is certainly something I’ve noticed among friends and within my larger circles: Most everyone experiences some healthy alienation from their birth families.

Much has been written about my generation’s fear of commitment. We’re waiting longer to marry, to start families, to buy McMansions. Maybe it has to do with coming of age during the Iraq catastrophe, or with entering the workforce post-2008’s financial meat grinder. Or maybe it’s the narcissism that comes with being the first kids to lose our minds on flip phones and Facebook. In any case, at times, Molnar’s The Nursery reads like a documentary about what happens when we place too much faith in an institution—be it work, marriage, family, or even children—to create meaning in our lives. For Miffo, this blind faith has devastating consequences as she drifts further and further away from her past.

Despite The Nursery’s often dark vision of family and parenthood, Molnar herself is warm, friendly, and speaks with the polite formality of someone for whom English is a third language. The author was born in Hungary, raised in Sweden, and now lives in Austin, Texas. When she’s not writing novels about a mother’s thoughts of harming her infant, she’s usually playing with her two kids and hustling them out the door for school.

“We undervalue the fact that raising decent humans takes a tremendous amount of energy, sanity, and resources. At some point, you have to sacrifice: Some people value the art more, some people value the family more. I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer.”

Sammy Loren: What was your life like, as an artist, within your own family growing up?

Szilvia Molnar: I grew up very working-class. Neither of my parents went to college. My dad was a machinist and my mom worked in an elderly home as a nurse. At the same time, both are creative in their own ways; all the different art forms were always present. Writing always just followed me.

Sammy: You were born in Hungary, grew up in Sweden, and now you live in Austin, Texas. How did being an immigrant, and speaking different languages, influence your approach to writing The Nursery?

Szilvia: The Nursery is actually my third novel—the first one that I managed to get published. It was almost like giving birth. I don’t have an MFA, so I’ve only seen, like, what comes out of the MFA programs. I guess there [was a desire] to copy that—just to fit in, thinking that would help me get published. But that’s not genuine. And as you get older, you end up accepting your eccentricities. Incorporating that into The Nursery—by having the protagonist be a translator, and having her neighbor also being foreign—was a way to bring a lot of my own identity into it. Many of the themes in the book are so universal and not tied to a country or a language. That was part of the goal, too.

Sammy: Literature is so shaped by the MFA industrial complex; it narrows the imaginative possibilities of what ‘good’ fiction can be. Learning that you don’t have an MFA, in part, clarifies what drew me to the novel—which is that most big publishers do not publish fiction like this.

I’m curious if any of this was weighing on you while you were writing?

Szilvia: Yeah, definitely. I was pulling a lot from personal experience. But at a certain point, writing during the pandemic, it was like, We don’t know what the world is gonna look like. I’m just doing this for myself. Having that insular view—even though it was incredibly painful—there was more joy around the art.

Sammy: Early on in the novel, Miffo is eating lunch with her husband, John, and says, ‘When I’m with John, I’m always myself.’ This, of course, gets turned upside down as Miffo becomes estranged from both herself and her husband. What’s the novel trying to say about the nature of intimate relationships?

Szilvia: There is this very huge shift in the protagonist’s identity, from giving birth and not being able to explain [things] to her partner—who, in theory, is present, but can’t support her in an emotional way. I was intrigued with this idea of a sudden shift in identity, and how you navigate that with all the things you were before. For Miffo, it’s this physical change, but also a mental decline, where she is spiraling into depression and unable to control it. At the same time, she wants to maintain her marriage. I wanted to play around with that. I had to have John be somebody who is not her polar opposite, but who creates conflict [when he’s unable] to connect with her anymore.

“Early reviews of the book were like, Don’t show this to new moms, and Don’t show this to people who want to get pregnant. I was like, What are we trying to hide?”

Sammy: Kafka kept coming to mind: Miffo won’t leave her apartment and undergoes an incredible transformation. There’s a deep alienation from her body and her family.

Szilvia: Yeah, Kafka is a good example. The first time I was pregnant, I had a huge craving to reread The Metamorphosis. I keep telling people that it’s actually the best mommy book around. Everybody around Gregor Samsa is happy and cheerful—expecting him to go to work as usual. And he’s suddenly grotesque. I wanted to spin off of that. In the US, there is a huge [pressure] for new moms to clean themselves up, stitch themselves back together, and pretend that everything is fine. But you’ve just pushed this nine-pound thing out of your body. With the grotesque, [I’m] being as detailed as possible, both to be honest about it and to pull humor into it.

Sammy: Speaking of the body, there’s this refreshing honesty around the protagonist’s obsession with and horror at her fluids, her milk, sweat, blood, shit. It’s written with such vividness. Why was it important for you to include those unvarnished realities in the book?

Szilvia: I was going through it myself. I wished I had that kind of literature around me, to comfort myself with. There is still quite a bit of taboo around women’s bodies: everything coming out of them, or the way they smell. Wanting to reveal as much of that as possible felt like pushing people’s buttons, but it also brought me a lot of freedom. Early reviews of the book were like, Don’t show this to new moms, and Don’t show this to people who want to get pregnant. I was like, What are we trying to hide?

Sammy: Buried throughout the book is a dark sexual energy. At times, Miffo feels both disgusted and betrayed by her husband when he’s affectionate with their newborn baby girl. And the husband seems jealous of Miffo’s friendship with the old man who lives upstairs. What’s your take on those unspoken dynamics within families?

Szilvia: People have bizarre thoughts, and to put that into literature can be quite refreshing. Nothing would have happened between the protagonist and her old neighbor, Peter, but she’s often exposing herself [around him] because she has to nurse. There are so many symbols around the nude female body, whether it’s the pregnant body or the nursing mother. I was trying to push it as far as possible.

Sammy: Tell me more about Peter, and what he symbolizes throughout the novel.

Szilvia: In early drafts, I couldn’t quite decide whether Peter would be real or not. I knew I wanted Miffo to have a buddy who listens to her and comforts her. But I was scared of inventing a ghost, which can run the risk of being gimmicky. I decided he would be an upstairs neighbor, whose health is failing since the loss of his wife. I wanted time to be running out for him, in order to create momentum in the novel—where this state that they’re both in just can’t keep going on.

“People have bizarre thoughts, and to put that into literature can be quite refreshing… There are so many symbols around the nude female body, whether it’s the pregnant body or the nursing mother. I was trying to push it as far as possible.”

Sammy: They’re mirror images of each other in a certain sense. Miffo’s dragging herself around, in so much pain, bleeding, her baby attached to her, squealing nonstop. And Peter, too, is decomposing, dragging his oxygen tank around. They’re both under this dread. Are parenthood and family a prison?

Szilvia: Some people will say that being a parent is a source of inspiration. But if we’re being honest, you suddenly have at least one more person taking time away from you, to do the art you want to do. It’s easy to be precious about it. Obviously, it always depends on how much domesticity you can outsource. And there’s a third layer to think about, which is, Well, is your art even going to be good? We undervalue the fact that raising decent humans takes a tremendous amount of energy, sanity, and resources. At some point, you have to sacrifice: Some people value the art more, some people value the family more. I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer.

Sammy: Are you ever like, God, I wish I didn’t have any kids? Or just always, I love my kids?

Szilvia: Sometimes, it’s equally painful to create art as it is getting your kid ready for school.

Sammy: As the novel progresses, Miffo has increasingly disturbing thoughts about harming her baby. She wants to shake her, and the kitchen knives become a fixation. She even wonders if her husband might molest the newborn.

What are you trying to say about being a parent? Is there a sort of violence inherent to the family, which though submerged, is always there?

Szilvia: For sure. I didn’t expect that having kids would bring up so much trauma, in terms of the ways in which I was raised. You’re suddenly in this power struggle with a kid you’re raising. They test your patience so incredibly much.

Sammy: The most vivid moment for me is when the baby is screaming her head off, and Miffo thinks, How bad would it be to give her one little shake?

Szilvia: Nobody checked to see that I could raise a kid. It just so happened that I could get pregnant, but nobody ever checked that I’m a decent parent. Not to discredit my parents—I think they did what they could—but in terms of society, we’re all allowed to be them. But should we be? Sharing that question, and exploring its answers in fiction, will serve us in the end.