Vera Zischke on Moms Who Carry It All (and What If They Can't)

Okay, friends, fan-girl moment incoming: I love Vera Zischke as an author. And if you haven't read her debut, “Ava liebt noch” (roughly, “Ava Still Loves”), you MUST, absolutely must. There's no soft-focus filter here. Instead you get the completely authentic, so-familiar everyday life of a mom of three, which turns into a sweeping romance with her daughter's much, much younger swim instructor after Ava has felt overlooked for years in a marriage that looks great from the outside.

A dream of a book, truly. But Vera wouldn't be Vera if she, a mom herself who also works as a newspaper editor, didn't keep right on writing at night. And so her second book is actually out now… and people! It has another great title, another great cover, AND content that really matters.

It's called “Pina fällt aus” (roughly, “Pina Drops Out”), and Pina is a mom, too. A pretty left-alone one at that. She looks after and supports her autistic son completely on her own, and at some point… she drops out. Who steps in when she can't anymore? What happens to the people around them when someone suddenly needs help and is so different from everyone else? It turns into a wonderfully colorful round of neighbors helping neighbors, that much I'll reveal, and in the end one thing is clear: every single person enriches our society. The quirkier, the better…

Vera, with Ava liebt noch you hit a nerve with sooo many moms. A mom of three in an okay marriage, one that mostly runs on getting through the day instead of love, falls for her daughter's much younger swim instructor… and suddenly all her spirits are awake again. She feels seen, wanted, back in the game… where did that come from for you?

When I wrote Ava, I was at home with three kids, I had a terrible job, nobody took me seriously as a part-time mom, and when I dared to say out loud that I was struggling with having so little say over my own life as a mother, someone told me: “Well, you chose this.” And I thought: I chose my kids, yes. But I did not choose to disappear completely into the mom role. Writing “Ava liebt noch” set me free and made me visible again.

What came first for you: the idea of showing how lonely a purely functional family setup can feel and what a few butterflies can do, or were Ava and Kieran and their forbidden love there first?

I wanted a sweeping love story starring an exhausted mom of three, one that begins in a damn diaper aisle. Quite a few publishers smirked at me for it, but I firmly believed there were lots of women out there like Ava, women thinking: finally, somebody sees me. Luckily my editor at Ullstein, a German publisher, felt the same way.

Did you fall a little bit in love with Kieran while writing, the way a lot of readers did? Or did you fall for that hot parallel world that suddenly gave Ava so much energy for everything else?

Of course I fell for Kieran, and hard. I wrote through the night because I had to find out for myself what happened with him next.

Ava meets Kieran in a drugstore, between the diaper shelves, looking completely disheveled. You know, the way you look when you only ran in for a quick pack of Pampers… That realness is surprising and makes it so easy to relate. Was that planned, or did it just happen?

I wanted to describe a mother's everyday life as truthfully as possible. I stood in my own kitchen so many times back then thinking I'd crumble to dust if I had to unload the dishwasher one more time. But above all, I couldn't find this world in literature at the time. Back then, mental load was something coaches talked about on Instagram. I didn't want a three-point guide to more self-care. I wanted an artistic exploration of this sometimes pretty bizarre daily life.

As a reader, you feel the longing for Kieran from second one. It can't be made up, you think… What does your husband say about the fact that it all feels so real, as if you'd been through something like this yourself?

That's a funny question, because unlike everyone else, my husband doesn't have to guess what's real and what's invented. And that's not how an author thinks about her material anyway. I write the story the way it has to be written so I can find out what I want to find out. And my question was: How much freedom can a mother allow herself?

I'm sorry to have to say this, but Kieran is made up. He doesn't exist, sadly, and I can't slip you his phone number. For me, though, Ava and Kieran are their own people, and sometimes I long to sit down with them in the kitchen and drink wine with Ava while Kieran cooks spaghetti carbonara.

Too bad 😉 But now you've followed up with another book, another beautiful cover, another mom theme in the broadest sense. It's called Pina fällt aus. And the title alone pretty much says it all: everything that rests on us moms, and what actually happens when it stops working… 

That's true. I'm not only a mom of three like Ava, I'm also a caregiver mom like Pina. So it started, once again, with the realization that there is no mother like this as the main character of a novel.

Pina has an autistic son and at some point simply collapses and ends up in a coma. I think I can reveal that much. Who takes care of him now, a young man who hardly speaks and needs his routines?

I spent two years picking away at this novel, trying to describe the daily life of a caregiver mom with a severely autistic son. But something was off. I felt I couldn't really stir up what I wanted to stir up. And then the realization hit me in a flash. If I really wanted to make this world something readers could feel, I had to take the mother out. What happens then? Who steps in?

It's become a book about community, about a building full of neighbors who step in, and each of them (quirky in their own way) benefits differently from the young autistic man. Not rose-tinted, but eye-opening, and once again: so alive… 

I think we've gotten a little rusty when it comes to building communities. Technology and paid services have made us all so independent of each other, and we don't want to be a burden. But we're social creatures, we need each other one way or another. And we can learn so incredibly much from people like Leo, who stand at an angle to our achievement-obsessed society.

Last but not least: where do the stories come from? Do they just fly to you, or is it hard, sometimes agonizing night work? 

It's always miserable digging around. Seriously, why do I do this to myself? I just threw out 230 pages of my third novel and started over. But the feeling of finally having written my way to the heart of what I want to tell is like nothing else. So the suffering pays off, and every discarded line turned out to be one more stone on the yellow brick road to the goal.

One last word of encouragement for all the moms out there, please:

You're doing great! You are enough! Your motherhood is your personal business. Shape it in a way that works for you and your family. And yes, ice cream is a meal!