I'm jordan kissner, author of the essay collection, thin places. And this is thresholds, a weekly series of conversations with writers and artists about moments of epiphony, or transformation that changed their lives in their a moment that they stepped across like a threshold into something new, and the way that experience changed everything they wrote afterward.

Jesman

chan's dabu novel is called the school for good mothers, and it's one of the break out books of this year. Her protagonist is a woman named frida who's trying to work full and single parent o two year old, and they're not sleeping much. And in a moment of exhausted irrationality, frida walks out to buy coffee and leaves her daughter home alone. A neighbor calls the police, and frieda is separated from her daughter, charged with neglect, surveiled round the clock and sent to the school for good mothers for mandatory year long re education. This book is thrilling and terrifying and precise an investigation of how society imagines the good mother, and how far we're willing to go to punish women who violate that image. Chan based the book on a true story, and i was excited to get to talk to her about the headline that inspired her, the fact that she wrote this book as she was deciding to become apparent herself, and the way she overhauled it once her daughter was born. Here's jasman chan, i've

been writing fiction for pretty much my whole life, and it's the i's the kind of life changing writing experience that you always want to have when you're sitting down at the desk. And most of the time, it's usually just like coming up with one terrible idea after another. But in te the run up to the the day's work, the that provided the foundation for the novel, i was ruminating a lot on the sub ject of motherhood because i was heading into my late thirties, and biological clockwise, it was time to make a decision, even though i would have gladly carried on ruminating for another decade and just waited and waited. But unfortunately, that's just not how the human body works. And so it was itwas time to to choose one path or the other. So i felt really pressured by that. I had a lot of fear and anxiety. So i already had motherhood on the brain. But i think one of the creative sparks, besides this emotional spark of just being freaked out about becoming a mam, one of the creative sparks also came from a rachel evive article in the new yorker in late 20 13 called where is your mother? And that non fiction piece, which is brilliant and devastating and really should be read by lawmakers all over the country. Unfortunately, a lot of the the really urgent writing about am the subject of family separation, doesn't necessarily get read by the people in charge. But i i read that piece, and it's about a a single mam who leaves her son at home, her toddler son at home, for a number hours, and the neighbors call the police when they hear the child crying. And after that day, she never gets him back. And that story just really lodged in my subconscience and made me so angry on that mother's behalf. And i didn't sit down with a note book and think, oh, this could be te the beginning of a larger project that's going to take years of my life. It was more that something about that story just stayed with me, so that months later, when i was coming up with short story ideas. I ended up a developing these characters and the idea of the school sort of based on the idea of surveillance and control and the question of whether or not it's possible to have any sort of justice if thereis one set of universal standards applied to parents from all different backgrounds.