Amanda Montei: On the Illusion of Work-Life Balance, Resisting Free Labor, Listening to Our Bodies, and Her Latest Book “Touched Out”

The first online writing course I took with Amanda Montei was called Writing And/As the Mother. A dear friend of mine, who flew out from Los Angeles to New York to care for and live with me and my family for five weeks as my postpartum doula, sent me a link to the course saying, “Thinking of you on your birthday.” When I expressed thanks and interest in taking Amanda’s writing course, she venmoed me $100 so I could afford to sign up. It was care work, done from a distance, for a caregiver (me). It can be a rarity, this act of love. 

I have since taken other courses with Amanda and because of her teachings, I have made many advancements on my memoir-in-progress. But Amanda has done so much more for me beyond painting the literary landscape I yearn to better understand. Reading her latest book, Touched Out, has provided me with a reckoning of the cultural landscape I was raised in and all the ways it has claimed the stakes over a life that I thought was of my own choosing, but in fact, in some part, it was something I was groomed into believing I wanted. 

Aside from both growing up around Burbank, California during the same decades, Amanda’s writing about her entry into motherhood and matrimony and all the feelings that have come with those experiences were freakily relatable. As she claims in her book, motherhood radicalized her, and as simple as that statement is, it is the purest truth that I’ve struggled to put into my own words since becoming a mother four years ago. 

Amanda points out that caregiving is viewed in our country as a private matter, not a public one, though all the while it still feels like a performance act. So much of becoming a parent or caregiver isn’t about learning and consuming, though that’s what we caregivers are programmed and told to do – read this book, buy this stroller, breast is best. It’s actually about unlearning, and purging. Relinquishing ourselves from antiquated gender roles, and the suffocating grasp around our necks that, for many women, have crept their way up and around our bodies since girlhood. It’s confusing to have every small choice with our children be a channel for something we hope to pass onto them, for a type of future we haven’t seen exemplified before. It’s isolating to feel anger, loneliness and despair when the world around us is projecting labels onto us like “lucky”, “privileged”, “healthy” regardless of the instability we’ve inherited, and the turmoil we carry within ourselves, haunting us along the way.

The hidden expectations that come to the surface during the transformation of motherhood feel like a slap in the face, because in hindsight, it hasn’t been hidden at all. Attempting to break out of the mold of “good” wife and “good” mother and redefine those terms for myself has excavated all the confusing feelings and sensations that have been present in my body since adolescence, since my head was being pushed into someone’s lap and my name was disgraced on the walls of my high school’s bathroom. The days that I feel trapped in domesticity, the days I have snapped at my child for pulling my hair too hard when I’d rather be working to contribute to my family’s financial income and wellbeing, have led to so much crucial reflection about what it takes to raise boys in this country, but also what the hell it means to claim myself a writer when that too is an invisible act of labor that gets little value or praise without commercial success. 

Reading Touched Out has prompted so many conversations for me amongst my peers, my spouse, and my children. It woke me up from a haze of guilt and despair, angst and pressure and brought me an immense amount of relief. Amanda’s book has served me as a gift and another huge act of love, one of very few I’ve received since that initial text nine months ago.

I spoke to Amanda via Zoom— while my one year old was upstairs screaming, crying the entire time because I wasn’t the one to put him to bed— about the illusion of work-life balance, resisting free labor, and the alluring sell of reinvention that our capitalist culture has muddled into matrescence. 

Ashley Rubell: In my studies with you, you have been immensely helpful at giving shape and structure to my manuscript. So naturally when I opened your book and read the contents page (from Beginning to Beginning Again) I couldn’t help but wonder: How did you map out this book and give shape to your initial vision for it? Did you write within an outline? Did you craft a pitch that gave focus to your writing-in-progress?

Amanda Montei: Oh, that's such a good question. [I mapped it out] through a lot of agony! Haha. I did a number of desperate things to figure out the book structure. Mostly I compose on my computer or write notes to myself late at night after long baths. But several times I also printed out the manuscript and chopped it up because I need more of a tactile off-screen vision of the book.

AR: Which section poured out of you first? 

AM: The section that poured out of me first was probably the work section. [That], and the consent chapter. [Those chapters] existed through a lot of different versions of the draft. 

This book started as a book of essays about motherhood that I wanted to write, whatever that meant. It was this very amorphous thing, so there's some writing that remains from when I started it. The work section changed a lot, but I think it came most easily because it's something I've been thinking about for a really long time, in my academic work: the history of the exploitation of women's work in the home. The consent chapter originally began as a series of essays, sort of in chunks, thinking through what it felt like to talk to my children about the world. Both of those chapters ended up spreading their tentacles throughout the book, because so much of it is about labor and about how we talk to our kids when the world is hard and we want to imagine something better for them.

AR: It’s such a big task.

AM: No small feat!

AR: And you wrote this book during the height of the pandemic, correct? In 2020?

AM: I worked really intensively on it then. I would say I finished it then. 

AR: When did you start it?

AM: I started conceptualizing it a year or so after my daughter was born, but like I said, it was this kind of amorphous thing. It was this writerly goal, a file on the computer. I had written a couple of essays, one of which was published. Then as the pandemic began, the consent chapter came, though not a ton of it remains, and then came the linguistics of parenting. 

When the pandemic happened, there was this renewed sense of urgency around [the book], both because of the political landscape and the care landscape, and also just in my life as a writer wanting to finish this thing as I felt myself getting sucked back into domesticity.

AR: You wrote, toward the end, that “you let everything else fall apart” in order to get this book written and finished. Can you elaborate on what that looked like? What did you have to let go of to manage the work-life balance? Or maybe it wasn’t balanced… 

How did you finish this book while doing other writing jobs, teaching jobs and the most loaded job of them all, being a mother?

AM: Well, I definitely let the idea that anything would be balanced fall away. It looked like a lot of closed doors with kids knocking on them. It looked like a lot of protecting my time. I will also say that a good chunk of this book was written while receiving unemployment because I lost some teaching work, and was also receiving direct payments through the child tax credit. That’s really important to talk about because we have this cultural idea that anyone receiving social service benefits is just going to sit around and be lazy. Having that little bit of financial freedom allowed me to do some of the most meaningful work that I had done up to that point and eventually led me to be able to do even more teaching work within my community that is valuable. It looked like making my partner take on a bulk of the domestic work and childcare at times. 

AR: Personally, I feel like that’s a much more difficult thing to let go of, especially when you’ve been the one doing it, child care specifically. My career took a huge hit when the pandemic happened and I also fell into domesticity. Now I’m in this weird place that both makes me feel trapped and invisible while I’m also benefiting from this privilege of a hetero-male partner whose income our family can rely on. It brings up a lot of unflattering feelings about what I’m participating in, in order to meet my professional and educational goals. I hate feeling like, as a mother, as a parent, I’m not changing anything. That I can’t open my mouth to complain because I have so much being given to me. But I also feel stripped of so much. 

AM: It is a privilege to have a partner with an income you can rely on. But it also creates a really complicated feeling of having to rely on a male partner, which can be uncomfortable, and I write about that a little bit in the book, too. 

AR: You started your Substack publication, Mad Woman, in late 2021. How did that space support you during your book writing process? Were you actively and strategically trying to build a following there to support your future efforts of selling a relevant book? Or was it more of a detached, organic success? Talk to me about that space for you as a writer, its evolution and its growth.

AM: Well, one of the things that I did as I started to really commit to the book was to start freelance writing again. I had been an intern for Ms. Magazine years ago, and I had always been in more small press literary circles, and I needed to make some money. So I started pitching pieces, freelancing a little bit, and it's a hustle, you know? I thought, well, why don't I try [substack] as a space where I don't have to wait for somebody to accept my pitch. I had all this writing about work. I had finished my PhD, I had a whole dissertation, not a lot of which has manifested in the newsletter, but I just had all this research that I had done about women's work and all this pandemic stuff was happening. It was becoming part of the cultural conversation in a very mainstream way. And I was like, oh my gosh, I just want to write about all these things, and I didn't want to wait for anyone to give me permission. So it started as Mad Moms and it was very maternal focused. Eventually I changed the name because I wanted to expand it as a kind of nod to the literary mad woman. I wanted to be able to write about more literary topics and broader feminist issues. It has been a really great way to create a writing practice without waiting for anyone to let me. It comes with its struggles, in terms of balancing it with the other work that we do as writers. But it's been great. Balance is an illusion, right?

AR: Did you start off asking for paid subscribers or did you start off free and then switch gears?

AM: I think I asked for paid subscribers right away. I feel like my work is valuable. I’ve always felt like my labor is valuable. I mean, at least outwardly. Certainly, I have internal struggles like anyone does. But I think it’s always important for me, as someone in a literary community, to resist an excessive amount of free labor. I did a lot of [free labor] when I was in academic spaces.

AR: And there’s a lot of that, too, in the publishing and literary world, which is why I am curious to know how you set it all up on your own terms. 

AM: Yeah, I was over that. There was no question about it. But I also hate asking for money and I hate to have a “commerce” voice, so… 

AR: Ah, the tension!

AM: Right? So, I don’t make a lot of money off of it, haha. 

AR: One of the many things you’ve taught me is that it’s commonplace to have a full draft of a memoir before querying agents. And I also know that oftentimes as writers what we sit down to write and what we end up writing don’t always align. How many versions of the book did you end up rewriting, in preparation of finding a publisher?

AM:  A lot of authors I know sell a book before they write it, which was something I sort of longed for in the process, but I also think I was able to take more risks because I hadn't figured the book out completely until it was done.

I always find it really confusing and shocking when people can name exactly how many drafts they've written of a book, haha. I'm an obsessive reviser and rewriter, so I have no idea how many drafts I wrote of this book. There are so many files. I definitely had a complete draft that I sent to my agent, who's wonderful, and we worked on it together, in chunks. We worked on a couple drafts together prior to [publishing], though I'll say that the book had a little bit of a different life. The original iteration was much more interested in the concept of beginnings and the way that I was seeing feminist empowerment or pseudo-feminist empowerment discourse talking about motherhood as a sort of opportunity for reinvention. Some of that remains in the book, in the chapters beginning and beginning again, exploring that kind of difference between matrescence as a meaningful growth period and this capitalist story of reinvention that we’re sold. I was much more keyed in around that. The more that I wrote about what was happening when I was talking to my kids and the more that I wrote about early motherhood, the more I was thinking about the body and how it's transformed by motherhood, but also how it's transformed [by the narrative we’re given] before motherhood [about motherhood].

AR: Was that the part in the book’s evolution when the title changed? You mentioned changing titles to me before, outside of this interview. 

AM: Yeah. I played around with a lot of different titles, but I landed on Touched Out because I see it as a metaphor for how so many of us feel, not just mothers. The other women and people who feel like power is all around us, ushering us this way and that way, telling us what to do. So, it's not just a book about this phenomenon that moms talk about on the internet of wanting to go hide in a bathroom. It's about much more than that. The phenomenon of feeling touched out is an interesting metaphor for how so many of us feel under these really pervasive, oppressive power structures.

AR: Is this broader metaphor of being touched out one that you’ve seen or known your husband to relate to in his early years of parenthood? 

AM: You'd have to ask him. I've talked to many dads who also have this experience, but, you know, I think it's different. Men's bodies aren't pawed at from a young age, they're not touched without consent in public spaces. Men certainly experience sexual violence, but not to the degree that women do. That's the physical touch component, right? But then there's also this ideological touch. And of course, men are, you know, damaged by toxic masculinity. And I write about that in the book and how it sort of turns us against each other, turns all of us against each other, turns parents against children. But it isn’t necessarily children's touch that is always driving us to our breaking point. I would say that from the parents that I've spoken to, the men that I've spoken to, that there's a level at which they can relate. But I mean, when I was writing this book, I didn't feel like I needed to write it for men, haha. And at the same time I hope that men can read a book that wasn't written for men. We [women] do it all the time. 

AR: What would you hope that men walk away with, should they be bold enough to read this book though it may fall outside of their comfort zone?

AM: I mean, when I was writing this book I don't think that I really cared. I hope that all men are aware that when women or people struggle with parenthood that there's a lot going into that. I do hope that there can be a deeper kind of exploration around what seems like a very surface level and small cultural phenomenon. I hope it makes men, women, all people think a little bit more deeply, with a little bit more nuance about their expectations for partners. The physicality of parenthood, of care, of family-making is missing from a lot of the discourse around things like what to do if your partner is having a sensory overload moment. 

AR: You make one mention (that I can recall) of your own father, about mid-way through the book, that he frequently spoke over you. I was left wanting to know more about his influence. How did the gendered roles in your own upbringing get triggered or specifically re-evaluated when you stepped into parenthood, and/or marriage, and/or freelance writing?

AM: Oh gosh, how long do we have? I wanted to emphasize other men in my life in this book because so often we fall into these misogynistic cliches like women have "daddy issues" (Katherine Angel, who I reference a lot in Touched Out, has a great book on this subject) or a "mother wound." As I write in the book, this places a lot of pressure on parents (but usually mothers) to solve patriarchal culture alone and totally ignores the socializing influences of things like public policy, culture, legal and educational institutions, as well as other interpersonal relationships that mean a lot to us growing up. For example, I write in the book about my first sexual experiences with boys and what they taught me about my body, including how much my voice and my desires mattered if I was to be wanted. Later, those lessons were accentuated by the expectations built into marriage as an institution, by the kinds of low-grade gendered aggression I've experienced in academia, by how niche and unintellectual motherhood writing is considered in literary and media spaces, and so on. All of this adds up, of course, and sends the message that what women have to say isn't important and often won't be believed.

AR: How the heck do you keep track of your research with a book like this? Is the distraction of the internet helpful or harmful to you in the research process?
AM:Well, I finished my PhD in 2019, so a lot of these texts had been sitting on my shelf since then. I kept returning to them and returning to them, over and over, trying to piece them together. I'm probably the worst at organizing research. I'm much more of a stacker. I like to stack all the books next to my writing space and dip in and out. There were times when I did more organized things like note carding but as far as the internet goes, it’s always a distraction. I always try to take regular breaks because I'm the kind of person that just needs space from the internet in order for my creative brain to be able to function. 

AR: I had never heard of the phrase “Touched Out” before, but it is a tipping point I experience on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. After reading your book, I can say with confidence that I am there. I am touched out currently and have been for like four years now. So thank you for teaching me about myself! I’m sure it’s going to be a similar source of enlightenment for a lot of millennial mothers. 

What shocked me the most while reading your book was that the areas of memoir were like reliving so many of my own (very specific) experiences — as an adolescent, confusing violation with arousal— and realizing that our generation carries this shared, internalized need to unravel the cultural grooming we’ve gone through. But as you point out in your  book, there’s a trained tendency for us to think it's our responsibility alone to break the system that isn’t serving us. That if we try harder, parent better, fix ourselves, fix our home – if we’re “good” so we’re told, or sold rather, freedom lies on the other side. So, here’s a classic millennial-mom question for you: What’s next? What comes after awareness? Where do we go from here? 

AM: There’s this idea that, having a moment when you don’t want to be touched or want to be alone, is a problem. Not giving credence to that is what’s next, I hope. It’s a signal that your body is sending, saying that it needs something. There is something happening under the surface. I try to think when I get overwhelmed around my kids or just need some space that it’s a feeling full of useful information. Maybe it signals that I need to be more connected to community. Maybe it means we all need to get outside because we live in really isolated, domestic environments. I think what’s next is what’s happening: talking about more community-oriented parenting. 

We’re in this moment, which I talk about in the book, of reckoning with our sexual lives and giving our children the language that we didn’t have around consent. But it can be really hard to do that when people don’t have bodily autonomy. That’s not to say the conversations with our children aren’t everything, because they really are. That’s really what we need next. It was very important for me writing this book to not have it be some sort of false sense of resolution or hope, you know? But to also depict the really powerful radical tenderness that happens when we care for children, and that we can’t do all by ourselves. That’s certainly what I was trying to do, is excel my way through these unsustainable environments in which we parent. 

AR: It’s so tricky to navigate when there’s no leadership, no exemplary way within reach. So we find ourselves just stumbling through it all… 

AM: Right.  That’s why I didn’t want to end this book with, “here’s how I teach you about how to talk to your kids about consent” but rather acknowledge just how complicated it is and how emotional it is. [Parenting is] beautiful and powerful and tender, but also confusing. That’s where we are right now. There’s definitely hope to be found there, but there’s also a lot of sadness and confusion and fear for our kids. I think that we’re not very good as a culture at allowing ourselves to have all of those feelings at once. 

AR: One of my favorite lines in the book is when you say, “It can be hard to know who is left on the shore, much less whether anyone will come for us. A terror only worsened by the fact that in America it is rare that anybody does.” That line struck me. It was such a profound moment for me while reading the book. 

AM: Because I think the truth is that we come for each other when we’re having this conversation. We have to find ways to take care of eachother. When you’re parenting alone with little support, especially in that sort of pre-pandemic time, before we started having these conversations in more public ways, it felt very isolating and very alone for a lot of parents, I think. It still does because there’s a lot of ways in which we’re failing to support parents.

AR: Yeah. Summer is officially my least favorite season because without school in session, we don’t have childcare. It’s been really hard!

AM: I know, I’m actually listening to see if the kids are home because they’re supposed to be coming home soon. 

AR: My youngest has been screaming the entire time we’ve been talking. 

AM: Oh, I can’t even hear it!

AR: His screams are ringing through my body right now. 

AM: Yeah. It’s like a sonic touch.

Amanda Montei has a PhD in English literature from SUNY at Buffalo and an MFA in writing from California Institute of the Arts. She is also the author of Two Memoirs. Her essays and criticism have appeared at Slate, Mother Tongue, Vox, HuffPost, Electric Literature, The Believer, The Rumpus, the Ms. Magazine blog, American Book Review, and others. She teaches writing and lives in California with her husband and two children.