“How do you balance work and motherhood?” It’s a question I imagine a lot of writer-moms have come to dread.

There’s a great running joke about it in Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, in which the protagonist, away from home teaching a course, is repeatedly asked where her children are—she replies alternately with the truth (with their father) and deadpan lines about how she’s left them with various snack foods to fend for themselves.

There’s a Certain Famous Literary Writer who speaks in interviews about her family with an almost contractual coolness—she agreed to birth the children, and her partner agreed to take it from there.