An Interview with Jonna Higgins-Freese

The 2026-27 season of the Final Thursday Reading Series slides into September with a featured reading by Jonna Higgins-Freese. Higgins-Freese is the author of the forthcoming memoir All We Can Do: A Memoir of Parenting and Illness (Bell House Press). She is also a UNI alumna and the author of Fearless: a Novel of Frances Perkins and Social Security. 

The FTRS creative writing open mic starts at 7:00. Come a few minutes early to sign up to read, and bring your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Higgins-Freese’s featured reading starts at 7:30. Books by regional authors will be available for purchase at the event. FTRS takes place on the final Thursday of the month at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. 

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin. 

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: Can you talk about the decision to write about your personal experiences in All We Can Do: A Memoir of Parenting and Illness? Was there a moment when you felt you needed to write a memoir, or was this a project that emerged gradually?

JONNA HIGGINS-FREESE: In the very first days, I certainly couldn’t write; I couldn’t even read. I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy reading at that time, but that I lost the ability to decode words. It turns out this happens to me when calamity strikes, as part of a fight/flight/freeze response. That inability to read or speak may also just be a natural reaction to pain – Elaine Scarry certainly makes a compelling case that speechlessness is key to the experience and meaning of pain in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. When Reuben was a few months old, Tim Fay, who at that time was editing The Wapsipinicon Almanac, asked me to write an essay. He’d been thinking a lot about old Iowa cemeteries and how they’re filled with the graves of infants and toddlers, and so I connected Reuben’s story with that. By that time I knew I wanted to write the larger story as a way to get my mind around it, to try to understand what just happened to me? What does it mean about me, and how should I live now? 

JO: Writing about personal experiences like that can be both rewarding and extremely difficult. How was this process different than writing a novel?

JH-F:Writing a memoir required less research, though there was still some. In both cases, there’s much more research than shows up overtly in the finished text - the research often becomes a kind of collective unconscious underlying the writing, rather than (I hope) something the reader would notice directly. At the same time, memoir requires all the same techniques as fiction - plot, characters, sequence of the narrative - what should be part of the main story and what is backstory. In both books those were all things that needed to be figured out and revised, versus things that I naturally figured out on the first try. 

In both cases, it was a struggle for me to create the narrative arc of a traditional western story, and I’m not completely satisfied with the “story” I shaped. I have a conflicted relationship with the requirements of story - just because our brains are wired for them, as neuroscience is showing, doesn’t mean that they’re particularly good for us or helpful. Our brains also like sugar and heroin, and no one argues these things are an unmitigated good. I’m interested in kishotenketsu, which is the Japanese word for the four-act structure common in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and other ways of thinking about story. In certain ways, I think Buddhism itself can be seen as an argument against the whole idea of storytelling, and that’s one reason it was so helpful to me as a practice and shows up so much in the form of the book. 

JO: Your prior book, Fearless: A Novel of Frances Perkins and Social Security, balanced the personal and the political parts of Perkins’s life really effectively. Was that something that the subject lent herself to, or did you have to do a lot of research to put the pieces together?

JH-F: I chose to write about the time period when the Social Security Act was being written and passed because that is one of the most critical things that Frances did in her public life (and it’s critical for the lives of pretty much every American), but also because it was such a key time in her personal life. Her husband had been ill for a long time, but the death of her best friend Mary during that time, which left Frances briefly homeless, and her daughter’s first symptoms of bipolar illness at that same time just seemed to me ripe for novelistic treatment. To weave together the personal and political strands, I had everything from Frances’s desk calendar to daily letters about office activities written by one of her staff to dozens of books about the New Deal, the testimony in the Congressional Record, and many more sources. I pulled all that information together into a chronology, sometimes on a daily basis, and then I could see the moments when things got intense. 

As one example, both biographies say that a key meeting to hammer out the draft bill, which was months overdue, happened at Frances’s house on December 23rd or 24th, 1934, just a few days after Mary had died. But her dear friend Henry Wallace was from Iowa, and his papers are at the University of Iowa, so one of the very first things I found was his desk diary, which showed that the meeting had been on Friday, December 21. And that was key in showing how Frances never had any time to deal with things, she just had to keep going. 

Mary died at 10:50 PM on Tuesday, December 18 - and remember that they’d thought for weeks that she was going to get better, and only knew for a week or so at the end that she was going to die. Then at 11:30 the next morning,Wednesday, after being at her best friend’s deathbed until after midnight, Frances chaired a meeting of the Committee on Economic Security. That very afternoon, there was a service for Mary for her friends in Washington, before they all went to New York for the funeral and burial there on Thursday, December 20. And then on Friday, December 21, Frances was back in Washington for the meeting at Mary’s house at 8:30 PM, where she locked the door, put a bottle of whiskey on the table, and told them they weren’t leaving until the draft was done. They again worked until after midnight, and then she took the train back to New York for Susannah’s coming out party back in New York on Saturday night. 

JO: I’ve heard you tell the story of seeking an agent. Danielle Svetcov, of Levine Greenberg, was the only one who responded. She said, “You’re a superb writer, but stories on this subject are a tough sell (to editors and to the public).” Why publish a book that experts agree will have a limited audience?

JH-F: It’s true that it can be a difficult read; Eric and my dad haven’t read it. They found it too painful to revisit that time. 

But the more general theme is that we all get what we don’t want in this life, and we don’t get what we want. It might not look exactly like this, but it happens to everyone. If how we responded is of benefit to someone else, I wanted to share it. 

Also, telling it is maybe part of my Buddhist sense of something Kim Stanley Robinson expresses as, “These things happened.” The original author’s note quotes James Baldwin. Of course my problems and suffering as a white, middle class person in the US are of a different kind than those with less privileged backgrounds or experiences. But I still find that his words speak to my condition, “While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”