Editor’s note: What follows is a special feature in which two authors interview each other about their work. Madeleine Moss’s novel Mistranslation publishes September 22 with The University of Iowa Press. Alexia Nader’s novel The Meaning of Daughter publishes September 15 also with the University of Iowa Press.
Alexia on Madeleine’s novel: This summer, I found myself free from my caretaking responsibilities of two young children for one week and I spent three mornings of this time in a hotel room bingeing Madeleine Moss’s debut novel Mistranslation. The bingeing had to do with not wanting to leave a certain reading state I often inhabited as a little girl. There I was again under the covers with a thick novel, a little yellow light, and a longing, not just to be transported to a bigger world, but also to be immersed in a large, surprising intelligence about that world. Mistranslation delivered.
Staring at the blank space under the novel’s last line, I immediately began to miss its third person narrative voice, gossipy and sharp (like my favorite 19th century novels), illuminating the lives of Sabina, Camilla and Khalil, twin sisters and their neighbor, whom we follow from the time they are nine until early adulthood. This authoritative third-person voice intertwines with the first-person auto-fictional voice of Violet, the twins’ mother. Violet’s voice is vulnerable, humble, and full of anguish, but also with a resistant spirit. The interplay between the two voices made me curious to speak about what can be expressed through structure with Madeleine.
Madeleine on Alexia’s novel: Although we’ve never met, Alexia and I share both a literary agency and a publisher, so reading each other’s work in order to pitch something together was an easy choice. I hoped I would like her novel and worried about what I would do if I didn’t. However, from the first page of The Meaning of Daughter, I was taken with the precision and subtlety of the first-person narration. This narrator is Merjan, who as a child has to leave her home country of Lebanon to immigrate to Haiti with her family. Both countries are described in evocative detail: at times nostalgic, at times alienating. Yet it’s when The Meaning of Daughter stunningly switches points of view a third of the way in—moving across decades and continents to introduce us to Merjan’s grown daughter, Yvonne—that I realized how ambitious the novel is, too. In total, the book comprises three sections: the first narrated by Merjan, the second by her daughter, Yvonne, and the third by her daughter, Eva, which together paint a fraught picture of ambition and maternal ambivalence. It’s a stunning novel with a wholly original structure, and I’m so glad I get to talk with Alexia about it.
Alexia Nader
Mistranslation is divided into two voices, the work-in-progress written by the mother character, Violet, and the third-person narration of the other characters (including Violet). Which part came first?
Madeleine Moss
I believe the initial idea was around the twin sisters, but the actual writing of Violet’s section came first. This was years ago: I was in my mid-twenties and going through a difficult time—somewhat miserable during a year in France, then very miserable in an MFA program in the U.S.—and I kept fantasizing about having a baby to escape my problems or at least to create new problems for myself. And at the same time, I’d always believed I didn’t want kids, so there was something destructive and not entirely serious about this idea. It made me think about a woman getting pregnant when she’s “too young” or not ready to do so, and the issues it would create for her. But actually, while I’d begun writing from Violet’s point of view, I kept restarting her section, so at some point I switched to the third person that narrates most of the novel and that follows her twin daughters, and I only came back to her “work in progress” much later.
Alexia Nader
How did developing the third person section about her daughters influence how you revised or moved forward with Violet’s work-in-progress after you returned to it?
Madeleine Moss
When I started writing from Violet’s point of view, she said and thought a lot of things that were more or less “me.” But when I started writing from the point of view of her daughters, Violet became closer to my own mother: someone who was creative but stifled and who was emotionally rather absent. I spent a lot of the novel trying to make the character of Violet make sense to me—probably in a manner similar to how I was trying to understand my own mother, with whom I share a number of characteristics yet had a complicated relationship.
Alexia Nader
Your story covers a relatively large span of time in the characters’ lives. How do you think about leaps in time in a story?
Madeleine Moss
As might be apparent, I love a good time jump! My favorite moment in perhaps all of fiction is the time jump that takes place after Isabel’s marriage in The Portrait of a Lady. With that jump, the relationships are redrawn and we come back to the same characters but immediately understand that things are different; I think it’s such a brilliant way to infuse a story with fresh energy. For Mistranslation, I tried to include time jumps in places where the relationships between the characters were about to be redrawn.
Speaking of time jumps and points of view, your novel, The Meaning of Daughter, is told in three sections. What inspired you to use this structure? How did you differentiate the three women’s voices?
Alexia Nader
I had all the characters’ voices in my head almost from the beginning, in a rough sense anyway, and from the very first draft wrote the voices in separate sections. I’m glad the voices sounded at least somewhat different to you! My goal wasn’t to differentiate them completely — mostly because I think that’s impossible, but also because I wanted the voices to feel influenced by each other. I wanted to develop different textures for each of the voices while getting the reader so immersed in their unique viewpoints that the sections feel separate enough.
One important way I created different textures to their voices was by using really different literary influences for each section and immersing myself in that reading only while drafting. For Merjan’s section, some of the things I read were the Old Testament, a book called Pearls on a Branch: Oral Tales which collects folktales from Lebanon and Syria from women storytellers, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, several works by Herta Müller and Clarice Lispector. For Yvonne’s section the influences were more contemporary (with the exception of Müller), Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid and Hilton Als’ The Women, for example. For Eva’s section, I reread The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante (it’s one of my favorite books) and Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow.
What works influenced your voices? I’m particularly curious about what influenced the third-person narration as I remember remarking as I read that you often capture the spirit of some of the 19th century literature mentioned by the characters in your novel.
Madeleine Moss
While I’m obviously not claiming to be on the level of the writers I’m about to cite, I was a big reader of “the Western canon” when I was younger, and that influenced my writing or at least what I was attempting to do. George Eliot was hugely influential, as was Henry James. The character of Bryn—I don’t want to give any spoilers, but an important side character—is more or less straight out of a Henry James novel; her exhortation to one of the main characters to “help” someone else is characteristic of many James meddlers. And Middlemarch was a big inspiration. At the same time, most of the Western canon is male (and white), of course, and I used the maleness in particular as something that was perhaps stifling book-loving Violet. She crucially never reads Eliot!
Let’s go back to time jumps, though. Between the three sections of The Meaning of Daughter, the reader has to be attuned to what’s been left out in order to fully grasp these relationships; one notable example is the ways in which Merjan has been a “bad mother.” The first section ends when Merjan hasn’t yet had Yvonne, while the second section picks up with adult Yvonne’s bitterness toward her mother. What made you place the section breaks here and what else do you want readers to pick up on in the spaces between sections?
Alexia Nader
I have to be honest: there wasn’t a lot of planning around that section break. I just got to a point in Merjan’s story where I felt there should be a rest and then I put it aside and started Yvonne’s story where it started. When I looked at them together later on, the gap made sense and pleased me. I got good advice when I was starting this novel: listen to the voice and just write, structure intuitively, then tinker with the structure when you have most of the material down and can take a step back and look at what your subconscious has given you.
There aren’t specific things I want the reader to pick up on between sections, but I hope that I’ve evoked each character clearly enough so that the reader has what she needs to imagine her version of what’s in those gaps between sections. So for example, hopefully the reader can imagine what Merjan was like as a mother given all that we know about her own upbringing, strengths and shortcomings. Then she can set that against Yvonne’s take on her childhood and her mother.
Madeleine Moss
I think we made similar choices in this regard! Okay, all three sections in your novel have first-person narrators, but the middle section also has Yvonne’s mother, Merjan, addressed as “you” throughout. Why this formally inventive choice?
Alexia Nader
You know the “you” voice in Yvonne’s section was pretty polarizing with my early readers. Some people thought it was really strong; other people thought that the section should just be in first person. The reason I kept it in was that I think it helps the reader experience something important about Yvonne and her estrangement. The “you” helps the reader feel that there is always a Merjan, as a kind of ghostly figure or unanswered voice, in Yvonne’s head. She’s never been able to push her mother away completely despite her hurt and her need for individuality.
Madeleine Moss
This leads me to ask: What is your relationship to your own mother like? And what’s your relationship to being a mother yourself?
Alexia Nader
I have a great relationship with my mother but I have to say that I’ve always been curious about her life before I was born and when I was very little. She went to medical school at a very young age and soon after she graduated, in her early twenties, she had my older brother. She stopped working as a doctor when I was young to become a stay-at-home parent. I’ve always been curious about the story around this decision from her perspective. I became especially curious about it when I became a mother, as I struggled through the pandemic to write this novel while taking care of my son. And actually for a good portion of this time, my mother was living with me! But it’s just one of those things that’s hard for us to talk about and especially so during the chaos of taking care of a newborn.
So anyway, The Meaning of Daughter, explores the cultural context of my father’s side of the family, my Lebanese-Haitian side, but that longing that I’ve had to understand my mother as a young woman, and a young mother, as I myself became a mother, was an important source for many of the novel’s inquiries.
I think that often novels are structured to ask questions that their authors are asking as they write. Do you think this was the case with Mistranslation and if so what was the question or set of questions?
Madeleine Moss
You know, my mom was also a stay-at-home mom, although she had mixed feelings about that role. To answer you, then, I think the central question in Mistranslation is around how much you’re supposed to sacrifice for your family. It’s a question that the twins face as teenagers and adults—to what extent is their bond supposed to come before other things they want?—and of course it’s a question for Violet, in terms of what she owes her daughters.
What’s funny is that, although I’d already identified similarities in our work, it’s in doing this interview that I’ve realized just how much our novels have in common, because it seems like the question of sacrifice is one of the central topics of The Meaning of Daughter, too! All of which begs the question: Should people be pairing our novels together for their next book club?
FICTION
Mistranslation
By Madeleine Moss
University of Iowa Press
Published September 22, 2026
FICTION
The Meaning of Daughter
By Alexia Nader
University of Iowa Press
Published September 15, 2026
