Taylor Harris is a writer, wife, and mom to three who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work has appeared in TIME, O Quarterly, The Washington Post, Longreads, The Cut, Romper, Parents, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and other publications. Her debut memoir, This Boy We Made, was published by Catapult in January 2022.

EB: How did you begin writing nonfiction? What drew you to the genre?

TH: In high school, I thought being a real writer meant writing a novel.

EB: Same.

TH: For my senior project, I worked on a novel based on my life, and my “mentor” read the first draft and was like, “I thought you were a writer?” Daaaang, Gina.

I went onto college where I didn’t exactly hate writing papers, but I also wasn’t accepted into a higher-level poetry writing course. It felt like poetry, fiction, or journalism were the only routes, and I knew that none of them quite fit. A few years later, my husband, Paul, found a graduate writing program in DC that offered a creative nonfiction track. I’ll never forget reading about it, like, “This is a thing?!”

I’ve always been an observer, and sometimes I’m so quiet I forget that I haven’t said anything to anyone in hours. Creative nonfiction is a space where I get to bring my notes and observations, my thoughts and questions, no matter the size or depth, to the page. I get to make connections, make a little more sense of my world (or not), cast light onto certain memories and ask you to do the impossible—to recall them alongside me. It’s an intense space that I’m often terrified to enter, but it’s the right space for me.

EB: I absolutely loved reading the excerpt of your book that was on The Cut. I immediately went out and got my own copy of This Boy We Made and read the whole thing. When and how did you begin writing this book? When did you know you needed to put your son’s story down on paper?

TH: Thank you. I love The Cut, and the excerpt they published means so much to me because it was there in the beginning. Sure, I revised it a million times, but a draft of it was in my book proposal. If you think of call and response, the scary events detailed in that first chapter were a call. They split our lives into Before and After. The significance came through loud and clear, and my job was to determine if I could craft a worthy response in book form. I was sitting in a café in Charlottesville, VA, one morning, days after we’d gotten the results of Tophs’s extensive genetic testing. I was a few weeks pregnant with my youngest, and I’d just found out Tophs and I each carried a BRCA2 mutation. I’m sitting there with my latte, facing the shop’s front window with my laptop open, and I get an email, probably from the high-risk cancer program I’d just entered. In that moment, I knew. As frightening as this unexpected twist in our story was, as much as I wanted to erase this mutation and start all over, I knew I would write this story. One of inheritance, how my son came from me and revealed so much of me, and what’s it like to mother a beautiful boy who has puzzled everyone.

The how was not as clear. Thankfully, Nicole Chung is one of my favorite people in the world, and she introduced me her amazing editor, Julie Buntin, at Catapult. Julie sent some initial notes on my book proposal, and I fell in love with how she took such care with my words. There’s something about my personality Julie intuited right away, and I knew I could trust her. It took about three years from selling my book to publishing it, which might sound long, but my story was still unfolding as I wrote. I wouldn’t have wanted to rush the process.

EB: Of course—that’s one of the hardest things about writing memoir, I think, is you’re often still living the thing you’re trying to write about.

One of my favorite things about This Boy We Made though is that it isn’t just about Tophs, like you said how you both have the BRCA2 mutation. You do such an incredible job of weaving in your own personal health journey—your struggles with anxiety and then your own genetic history—alongside Tophs’s story. When and why did you decide to braid your story alongside Tophs’s story? How did you figure out the best way to do that?

TH: I knew I’d write about mothering Tophs and how testing his body led me to test my body, but I wasn’t sure if my anxiety disorder belonged in this book. Naturally, I’m a fan of intersections in writing, but I also didn’t want to presume every facet of my life should end up on the page. Early on, Julie encouraged me to write the anxiety thread. Just write it. So I started labeling notecards with major points or events pertaining to my life before Tophs, and I taped them to my office wall. Underneath, I taped cards that had more to do with Tophs’s medical and educational journey. Then I started to see where they connected and overlapped. Around this time, my husband Paul discovered dry erase wall paint! Suddenly I could take a marker and write on the wall, and I’d draw lines between events and ideas. The structure of the book still wasn’t right, but the parts were there.

EB: I am also a big fan of taping notecards to walls but, oh my god, I need a dry erase wall in my house now.

TH: The structure started to come together more as I read Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. The way she moves between topics and timelines in her novel opened another door in my brain. You don’t know what you don’t know, and I’m always thankful when a writer helps me see another way through.

EB: Totally. I can only write because of the writers before me.

So, when it came to the line-level writing, something that I find really challenging when writing about medical stuff is how to keep things from getting too jargon-y, especially when you get really immersed in your research and you forget that not everyone has the same vocabulary about these things as you do. How did you manage to keep the book so clear and conversational and direct and not get bogged down in the technical medical stuff?

TH: I didn’t take any science classes after high school biology, so I entered the world of genetics with a certain curiosity, but also a lack of patience. I didn’t want to get bogged down in the big words and those drawings of twisted ladders. I memorized enough so that when I show up at appointments, the medical team knows they can’t just tell me anything. It’s like the way Paul wears nice slacks and a blazer to the appointments. And for my readers, I also want to show I’ve done my research, but they sure don’t need to go sifting through all the files with me. When this book ends, I don’t care whether you know what the enzyme AST stands for. I want you to know I’d travel the world to understand my son, to feel close to him, to be certain he knows I love him.

EB: Well, I at least walked away from your book knowing that! Now, feel free to speak about writing This Boy We Made in particular or writing nonfiction in general—but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?

TH: When I was in grad school, I asked my favorite instructor, David Everett, if writing could be literary and funny. He said, “It’s challenging, but if anyone can do it, I think you can.” I loved David, and even if he gave me too much credit, I chose to believe him. Sometimes I’m still not sure if I’m being too ridiculous or too serious at times in my writing, but I know my brand—if writers have brands?—is writing the sad stuff with a bit of humor. Maybe it doesn’t show in every essay or article, and that’s okay too. The most rewarding part is hearing that my friends laughed aloud and/or cried in a Starbucks. It’s not that I go around wanting people to cry, but when they do, it probably means we’ve connected somehow. Or if they’ve snort-laughed alone in their car, I’ve hit on something. That feels really good.

EB: Writing can often be a super solitary task. Who or what do you turn to for support while writing?

TH: People are great, but have you ever had ice cream?

EB: [laughter] I mean, your Instagram handle is @writingforicecreamduh. What are your favorites?

TH: Whether for celebration or a pick-me-up, I turn to Ben & Jerry’s Netflix & Chilll’d, which is a peanut butter ice cream with brownies and swirls of sweet and salty pretzels. Is there a more perfect flavor? Well, Graeter’s might have something to say about that. Their Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip, made with the French Pot method, basically buries boulders of smooth chocolate in a rich peanut butter base. Need some banana thrown in? No problem. Penn State’s Berkey Creamery offers Monkey Business, a banana base with swirls of peanut butter and chocolate flecks. Want some cookies to go with your cream? Try Cool Jacks’ snickerdoodle cookies with salted caramel ice cream or their classic—vanilla sandwiched between chocolate chip cookies. But I mean, ice cream is fine.

EB: Love it. I’m going to go try all of these flavors right now.Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?

TH: I am terrible at picking a favorite anything, but I’m reading an early copy of Chloé Cooper Jones’s memoir, Easy Beauty, and holy moly. I’ll just share a few lines from the first chapter:

The stranger’s stare fastens, binds me tighter to him as he moves closer. His eyes scrape across my body, then he looks away, back, away, then skips discretion and takes in my length, eyes prowling up and down. Newness incites the eye and l am always a new thing.

I want to be wherever Chloé Cooper Jones is writing. Have you heard of eyes scraping? Okay, one more line I can’t get out of my head:

It is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.

I have no idea how she does it, but I hope by the time this interview is published, she has received all the praise she deserves.