Writing With ‘Interiority’ in Narrative Nonfiction
Abigail Leonard on getting inside her subjects’ heads
Last year, I received a galley of journalist Abigail Leonard’s book, Four Mothers, which follows the journeys of women in Japan, Finland, Kenya, and the U.S., as each navigates their first year of motherhood. In her introduction, Abigail describes her reporting endeavors as a new mother herself who had moved to Japan and started asking questions about how different societies support families. She quotes the poet Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
The New York Times offered a glimpse of that truth this week, speaking to women across the country about the real cost of motherhood in the U.S., for a video short that I first watched on TikTok. Four Mothers, which was released last month (and has already been named as an Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of 2025), goes even deeper into the daily realities, using specific techniques of narrative nonfiction to report intimately on her subjects.
Abigail begins in the style of a reported essay, positioning herself as the narrator and guide into the worlds of new mothers. Her book feels in conversation with Essential Labor or Like a Mother, both by Angela Garbes, or more recently Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, by Amanda Hess—books grounded in journalism and reflection, weaving facts, scenes, and research with personal observations.
But as I delved into Four Mothers, I was particularly struck by the close attention Abigail devoted to each woman she profiled. After the intro, she shifted away from her own point of view, and instead wrote relying heavily on her subjects’ interiority. Here is Abigail describing the emotions, thoughts and feelings of Tsukasa, as she goes through childbirth in Japan:
She’s sweating, though she’s not sure if she’s hot or cold. Waves of contractions seize her like a vise around the midsection and she struggles to remember what the nurse had said about how to stay calm. There is the emptiness where her husband should be—where he would have knelt to comfort her.
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