Kristen Millares Young went looking for God and found a woman, found a goddess, found herself. She went looking for new stories about girlhood, motherhood, womanhood and found an origin story, her own but also that very first story of that very first woman. No, a goddess. The goddess, mother of all the gods.
In this way, Desire Lines, Millares Young’s debut memoir out October 2026 from Red Hen Press, is a sort of map, an “emotional topography” whose routes and ridges take her from Anatolia, home of the meteoric myth of the divine mother, to Millares Young’s ancestral homes in Spain and Cuba, to her grandmother’s kitchen, then far, far beyond it.
Desire Lines, which contends with themes of both empowerment and estrangement, trembles with truth—but also with violence, circling around and around and around a singular harm that if not for Millares Young’s own dogged self-determination, her own refusal to be reduced, might’ve defined her life. In these essays, she collapses what she calls the “dark matter” of her family’s own complicity in such harm, makes it supernova, floods it with light.
These essays are a liberation, too, then. They are a confrontation, a reckoning and a revelation. They are an invitation from Millares Young and from a full choir of feminist writers and thinkers whose words interweave her own throughout the book, to refuse diminishment and erasure.
“The work we must do: Move toward emotional freedom,” Millares Young writes in Desire Lines’ penultimate essay. “Leave evidence so others can follow. I take myself to the place of dangerous revelations. With art as my throughline, I have found the goddess. It’s in the making of beauty that past misery is bearable.”
This conversation, which took place over Zoom, has been edited for length and clarity.
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Beth Ward: I’d love to begin with a quote of yours that I read. In a previous interview, you said, “Had I known I would write a memoir, I might not have allowed myself to become a writer.” What demands do you think memoir makes of you that fiction and journalism, the other genres you work in, don’t necessarily make?
Kristen Millares Young: That’s a very good question. I think it’s standing with your own story, being held accountable to the divergences in narratives that are invariably present when there are multiple people involved in situations, being called to account for your shifting understanding of your own life over the weeks, months, years, decades, that may have elapsed since the events in question, being visible, being made—to borrow a term from Christina Sharpe—legible.
There is a kind of surrender that you must do, because you can put your story out there with the greatest of intentions and the highest integrity, one that isn’t about individual restitution at all but about connecting with other people who may feel and think and see in the same way, knowing that those people may emerge slowly from other contexts and come into your life.
But it’s also knowing that the cost is opening yourself up to judgement, opening yourself up to retribution by angry people who were counting on the story never being told, who were counting on the idea that, in order to remain in relation to a context, maybe the family, that a woman—it’s often a woman—would shoulder the lifelong task of silencing herself. Abdicating her responsibility to her own emotions and instead vacating that lived experience in order to uphold the narrative that had been promulgated by the larger group.
This is part of why abuse is so common. Because if these abusers knew that they were going to be hauled into the open regularly, and without shame, by the person who had endured their aggressions, there would be a kind of reckoning that is largely absent from our society right now.
In that moment of deciding to share, deciding to tell your own story [in memoir], you are rupturing an agreement that you were often asked to make before you could really, legitimately provide consent. You were a child.
It’s strange how so many of those girlhood agreements carry forward throughout a lifetime. I have seen multiple generations of women in my family sustain agreements that did not serve them, unto death.
And I just thought, enough.
BW: Right, it’s this notion of women as silent archives, as knowledge holders and secret keepers. And it just kind of buries us over time. And as writers, we can maybe begin to unbury ourselves by working in other genres, writing fiction, doing the journalistic work you’ve done, helping other women liberate themselves in some way. But that doesn’t always liberate you. It helps, but it doesn’t truly liberate you. And Desire Lines feels very much like a liberation when you read it.
The book itself contains so many threads. It contends with familial legacy, goddess mythology, motherhood, girlhood, grief, rage, the long half-life of abuse. It feels very much like an ecology of women’s lives, a web of women’s experiences. I’d love to hear how you were thinking about Desire Lines thematically as you were collating these essays. Were you thinking about it as an ecology? Or is what it was “about” something that revealed itself to you more organically as you were bringing the book together?
KMY: I love [a braid] in text. I love it in a landscape. And I love it in threads of thought that come down through the millennia, through various women’s voices.
So, thinking about ecology, thinking about ecosystems, the feminist thinkers that I cite throughout the book definitely helped brace this idea that Sara Ahmed has written about, which is that the personal is structural. These issues that we have always been taught, that were hammered into us as individual issues, our personal issues, that idea is one that was hardily disproven by the existence of these other women who were willing to speak. And by speaking, they helped me see how widespread this was, how impossible it was to get at this issue through my own personal reorientation.
By having this system of other thinkers who are not only contemporary thinkers, but also those who have come before, it helped me feel less alone.
BW: You do include quotes and lines from so many other feminist writers and thinkers in these essays. You have Audre Lorde, Kate Zambreno, Adrienne Rich, Hélène Cixous, and many others. It gives you this sense when you’re reading that Desire Lines is not just of your voice. It’s a chorus of women’s voices. It’s citation as a feminist practice.
Why was it so important to you to have the echoes of these voices in your essays?
KMY: It’s calling for witness.
When we bring in these other thinkers, when we practice citation as a feminist dedication the way that [Sara Ahmed] calls for, we also put our own experience into conversation with others. If we were to remain only with the testimony of the people closest to us, like the patriarchs of the family, there would be so little light escaping.
So you need that, those webs of connection, to kind of open up apertures for the thoughts to emerge and the connections to form.
It’s strange how so many of those girlhood agreements carry forward throughout a lifetime. I have seen multiple generations of women in my family sustain agreements that did not serve them, unto death.
And I just thought, enough.
BW: In considering some of the other throughlines in this book, the Great Mother goddess, Cybele, appears in several of your essays. What most compelled you about her story when you first encountered her? What about her history, her mythology felt relevant or familiar to you?
KMY: So many of the goddesses that had been introduced to me previously in my life were from cultures that did not, geographically or through my blood lineage, pertain to me. So, I think about them, I’m fascinated by them, yet they are outside of the frame of reference for the context I was raised in.
What was so interesting to me about Cybele was that it seemed like she was this bedrock beneath the frame of reference I had been given, one who turned on its head all the meanings that I had been given about the role of a mother, and what it means to mother, and what it means to occupy power.
She has myriad origin stories, but she’s not depicted with child. There are ideas of her that she was estranged from her family, then had a child and was brought back into the fold, but that child never reappears in her imagery. And I had never truly understood—or I understood, but I didn’t like it—how it came to be that virgin motherhood would be the lynchpin for an entire belief system. It was disconcerting to say the least, and also, I just never bought it.
I understood this goddess as someone who conferred protection without making herself subservient. Her motherhood is of all the gods, all of society. It’s not her relegation to having produced one child who then is the leader.
And just seeing a great mother goddess with predatory birds, seeing her with lions—I’ve been going to museums my whole life. I love to look at the history of art. When I was in Berlin—and I kind of had the same experience at the Louvre—there’s this gallery there of Flemish art and whatnot, and it goes back hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of years. And I’m walking from room to room, and every single depiction was of piety, virginity, the virgin mother.
I was walking through these rooms, and I started getting this headache feeling this relentless pressure on women throughout all these centuries to vacate their own sexuality, while also having the double journey of remaining desirable but never giving in to those feelings, to that desire.
I thought about how that translated into the ways that the women in my family contained their own power. The women in my family had been locked into a lifelong battle with their bodies, always feeling like they were too big, always feeling like they should restrict their appetites and made sure that they stayed the same weight from puberty unto death.
BW: You write in Desire Lines, “I was shocked to learn that God was once a woman. What else had I not been told?”
This had me considering what we lose as a culture, and specifically as women and girls, when patriarchy buries and sublimates these matriarchal origin stories. Or what we lose when we don’t have a conception of women [mythopoetically] who are divine and ferocious and revered or conceptions of motherhood that are ferocious and fierce.
KMY: Clarissa Pinkola Estes is someone who has done a lot of work in this realm, and what’s so interesting, what I love about her work—and I think it relates to Cybele—is that if, in a story, you found a witch in the woods, often in the earlier tellings she was a divine figure who provided guidance.
The recasting of the story to serve patriarchy is something that was perpetrated onto Cybele’s story, and has been perpetrated on so many stories that have these etymologically capacious roots that go through centuries and millennia. And yet, overtime, the meaning gets subverted to sustain a power structure that is rapacious and extractive.
BW: I’d like to shift gears just a bit and talk about violence. In Desire Lines, a kind of thrumming sense of violence hums beneath some of the prose. Even when you’re not writing about violence overtly, there’s this sense of subtle threat shimmering throughout the book. In some of these essays, that’s text rather than subtext. But I found the way it felt reading the book to mirror the way it can sometimes feel to move through the world as a woman—constantly contending with a specter of violence.
Can you speak a bit more about that and how you were thinking about violence in these essays?
KMY: I do believe that in this ongoing collusion that we have among men—and women—to sustain the patriarchy, that there is always the men’s knowledge that when push comes to shove in an individual situation, a woman can be overwhelmed, can be hurt. And they play on that in order to get what they want: whether that be agreement to stay friendly in a conversation, agreement to carry forth an idea that they may have introduced in a boardroom. The truth of that goes so deep, and as women, we are very sensitized to their rising frustration or anger. Because we know that there is a breaking point at which we will be the thing that is ruptured. Not their belief system, but rather our bodies.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this book by Jen Percy called Girls Play Dead? It’s a very difficult book, but it’s a beautiful book about all the ways women respond to the threat of rape, because there is an idea that has been lodged into the police training manuals that anyone who doesn’t turn into Wolverine the minute they’re aggressed upon isn’t actually raped. So, to the evidentiary body, oh, you’ve got to have strips of skin under your fingernails and your body has to be completely destroyed in order to prove that you didn’t want to have this experience.
The reason Jen Percy wrote this book is because one time, she was on the phone with her mom when an intruder came into her bedroom, in her house. And what she did was to politely get off the phone with her mom and say brightly, “How can I help you?” The man was so frightened by this response, that he fled. But then she is left with the, “What the fuck was that all about? What just happened to me? Why did I do that?”
I’m sure there’s a certain amount of self-recrimination that happened over the years that spurs the reporting of the book, but then finding out that this is a method women use to try and stay safe, to try to stay alive. If you can manage the aggression and manage those other people’s desires, then you can survive.
In some ways, I credit my matriarchs. They survived. They survived being raised by or married to abusive men. They survived being beautiful and small in a society manipulates the beautiful and the small. They survived being exoticized after migration to the United States, within a society that is deeply invested in ideas of Latina sexuality that makes us prey.
But the tools they used for that survival ended up also being the tools that, to my mind, prevented them from thriving, and more importantly, would’ve prevented me from thriving. I no longer wanted to carry forward the tools that they used, even though they had, quote-unquote, worked for them.
When we bring in these other thinkers, when we practice citation as a feminist dedication the way that [Sara Ahmed] calls for, we also put our own experience into conversation with others. If we were to remain only with the testimony of the people closest to us, like the patriarchs of the family, there would be so little light escaping.
BW: This speaks, too, to some of the things we were talking about earlier—these ideas of silence and erasure. And many of the essays in this book are interested in these ideas, in all their various forms: silence and erasure as a kind of violence in themselves, the ways we are silenced as women, the ways we learn to silence ourselves.
But there’s also a tension, too, between that kind of silence and the kind that you choose to wield in these essays as a form of liberation for yourself, as a kind of demonstration of agency and boundary, where you don’t get give readers gratuitous details of certain instances of abuse and harm.
Can you speak a bit about that tension between silencing and an intentional withholding?
KMY: The essay, “Add a Little Salt” [from Desire Lines], I performed it first as a craft lecture at the Port Townsend Writers Conference, and that craft lecture was called “The Invitation and the Veil: On the Power of Withholding.”
Sofia Samatar has written about this. She, in her book, Opacities, borrowing a term from Édouard Glissant, talked about reserving the right to opacity in a society which commodifies suffering and extracts it as evidence of being rather than attending to the craft of the telling.
So many memoirs and other works of nonfiction—and fiction—sensationalize trauma as a way of creating meaning. But in order to make a reader actually feel their way through the long tale of an experience of trauma or abuse…there is the inciting moment, but for me, the most terrible aspects have been the enduring legacy of containment. Both within my own memory, not letting it grow like wildfire throughout my psyche, but also within the realm of family, or social or political conversations.
Once you introduce those factors, you often become reduced to the worst thing that happened to you.
So, exercising agency over what details to disclose, demanding the respect of readers to say, “I need you to trust me when I tell you that my dismay was earned. Period.” This was not a jurisdictional process by which I paraded my life out there and then invited reassessments about what could’ve gone differently if had done this, or if I had said that, or if I had done a different thing.
And I think that the artistry of withholding is that you create a gravitational force. In that particular essay, I write about heat and liken it to the dark matter of the universe, where that which goes undisclosed or is unseen is actually the underlying force which organizes everything around it. And that has been the truth of my experience, which is that those things which we not disclose gain power over time.
Naming the silence and the nondisclosure, for me, was a way of giving shape to an experience which could’ve been reduced to scene, but in fact was a structural paradigm. If I let it just rest on the scene, then I haven’t gotten at everything that permitted that scene to take place. And I think people swap out the titillation of a straight telling for a more emotional evocation of what holding that story feels like over the course of a lifetime.
Opacity is a craft tool. It’s one that people don’t teach, and I think that they should.
BW: I have another craft question as well. In many of your essays, you deploy a second person address. You’re speaking to “you,” in many of these pieces. Who are you addressing in your work in this way? Are you speaking to readers, a past version of yourself?
KMY: It’s “you,” as the one person who I have drawn into intimate relation with me, and with my thinking, and with my life, and with my way of relating. And that direct address, it just comes naturally. It just comes out.
There’s this one line: “Who’s the I, who’s the you, who’s the woman whose mind you move through?” And it is [that]. You and I are collapsed into one. And in some ways, that’s one of the beauties of reading and writing. You can create a communion which blurs the boundaries of selfhood and allows for empathic resonance to permeate what would otherwise be a very private experience.
What I also hope that the second person direct address of the book does is show, …in some ways, my acquiescence to knowing that I can never control the meaning that is made out of this story. I can be in conversation with the reader, and I can even influence how someone may think about something by asking apt questions, but that in no way contains the possibilities of their imagination, nor of their judgement, nor of their subsequent ruminations and how that might yield a different morality.
Some people have asked me, “Do you think that your family will read [Desire Lines]?” And I don’t actually [think they will]. But they’re not the people I wrote it for. I wrote it for other women, to connect with them.
BW: That speaks directly to my last question here. You write in Desire Lines that stories are sanctuaries. I’d love to know if maybe that was one of your hopes for the book, that it be a sanctuary for whoever does find it? And if it’s not, what are those hopes, especially for the women who read these essays?
KMY: Being a writer in the modern era, there is so much ancillary work which is asked of you in order to bring a book into the world. And that ancillary work can feel diminishing. Boiling a 10-year project down into its 1,200-word encapsulation, removing all the mystery. The book, there’s so much mystery in it. And that is partly related to its opacity, partly related to its collective thought, partly related to the mythology, partly related to the landscape. It’s all working as a piece. It’s one big shimmering web.
And yet, that process of abstraction also really makes you reckon with what you were actually doing that whole time [you were writing the book]. Sometimes it’s possible to hide your intentions and beliefs even from yourself. And maybe that’s you spinning a cocoon for them to live in until they’re ready to emerge. And I think that is, in truth, what I’ve done here.
The process of promoting a book, and the process and experience of being the person who has revealed yourself to the world are at odds sometimes. But the quality of the conversations that I have with individual women during this revelation era, that is the yield of all those years.
And as long as I stay very close to that knowledge, I’ll be okay.
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Kristen Millares Young is a novelist, journalist, and essayist. Her memoir Desire Lines, which Melissa Febos calls “searching, generous, and unrelenting,” is forthcoming from Red Hen Press on October 6, 2026, and was named a Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026 by Ms. magazine. Her novel Subduction was a staff pick of The Paris Review and won Nautilus and
IPPY awards. Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Literary Hub. A former Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House and the editor of Seismic, she was in residence in 2025 at Storyknife Writers Retreat and as a UNESCO Cities of Literature fellow in Reykjavík. She was the researcher for the New York Times team whose “Snow Fall” won a Pulitzer Prize.