Naima Coster on Motherhood and Motherlessness in ‘Take What You Can’

By Amaris Castillo

Naima Coster’s new novel, Take What You Can, is a rich and winding exploration of female friendship, motherhood and womanhood. At its center are Val and Milly, who are the best of friends. They met in 2004, the only Black students on a study-abroad trip in France, where they were also taken under the wing of an older woman named Helene.

Fast forward to 2018, and Val and Milly are now in their thirties, each married, and with a baby girl on the way. Milly, a successful influencer, convinces Val, a journalist, to move to New York City with her husband so they can raise their daughters together. As motherless mothers, they’re determined to create a new kinship structure for their own children. But differences between the longtime friends—social, economic, and more—begin to threaten what they spent years building. And there’s the topic of Helene, who they rarely talk about.

In Take What You Can, Coster casts a panoramic view of the stickiness of friendship with its constant balancing and unspoken expectations. With great sensitivity, the author also explores other themes—including motherlessness, social class, and the invisible-but-deeply felt mental load on mothers and wives.

Coster spoke with the Dominican Writers Association recently about her third novel, writing motherlessness in her characters, and much more. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Congratulations on Take What You Can. This is your third novel. How do you feel about it coming out soon?

I’m so excited for this book to be coming out. It was the hardest book for me to write. It was hard emotionally, because all of the themes I was writing about were active in my life—raw and unsettled—which I’d never had before. And because I gave birth to two children over the course of writing this book, it’s the first book where I really had to juggle motherhood and pregnancy with writing. It took a lot for me to finish this book, and I often wondered if I would ever be done. I’m just so happy that I’m on the other side of it, and I get to share it. I’m proud of what I created.

Your book is about so many themes that intertwine and feel inextricable from each other. There is friendship, motherhood and newfound family. How did you decide on these themes? Is there one that you’re most preoccupied with?

That’s a great question. I started with the themes of class and new motherhood because I wanted to write about the ways that becoming a parent can magnify differences in class between friends. It’s something I felt in my own life as a mother. I’ve always been aware of class. Even as a child, I was aware of class differences in my friend group. But it became even more pronounced when I became a mother. I would do calculus, like, How many hours of child care can I afford, to go and sit and write in this coffee shop? How many resources do I have? How much support do I have? 

The theme that really surprised me and ended up being at the center of the book was this theme of grief. Grief at not having what you feel that you need, whether that’s financial resources, support from elders, community, a mother. Both of the women in the book are motherless mothers, and that’s partially where the title came from. You take what you can. It might not be everything that you need or wish for yourself, but you work with what you’ve been given.

I find that you write about motherhood so viscerally and honestly. Can you talk about how you came to frame both Milly and Val as motherless mothers? That felt very intentional.

I knew that I wanted to write about motherlessness and how that could take on new dimensions and become painful in a new way when you become a mother yourself. I wanted to write about at least two different kinds of motherlessness. One is Val’s motherlessness due to estrangement, because her mother has cast her out of her life. Then there’s Milly’s motherlessness, which is that her mother died, and that her mother loved her deeply. So there’s the loss of a mother who was everything to you, and there’s the loss of a mother who never mothered you at all. There’s also death versus estrangement, which could feel like a death, but isn’t. I wanted to explore those different kinds of loss and think about the ways that they shape the women differently. The women can connect around motherlessness, but they’re also things about each other’s experiences that they’ll never understand. Val will never understand how devastating it is to have lost a mother who you adored because she thinks, Well, at least you had a mom. At least your mother loved you. Milly can understand Val’s grief, but in some ways she doesn’t fully understand how much it has formed Val’s sense of self and her self-esteem. Motherlessness is something that brings the women together, but also makes it difficult for them to understand each other.

Milly is a successful influencer who seems like she has it all. But it doesn’t feel like enough. She has this strong resistance to having motherhood and marriage limit her. What message were you hoping to send about motherhood? 

I love Milly because I think she is a very empowered character who is in touch with her desires, and also feels permission to lead a good life. Milly feels entitled to money, pleasure, freedom, sex, connection—all of these things that I think are taboos for women, period, and certainly for women of color, Black women. These become especially taboo when someone becomes a mother. In Milly, I wanted to write about how those desires don’t die out, and sometimes they grow even stronger because of the ways that motherhood demands so much of a person. I wanted to write about a woman who doesn’t give up on herself and her sense of possibility for her life, just because she has a child and she loves that child. I know that might be difficult for some readers to stomach. But in some ways, I think of her as a character who gives me permission to let motherhood be a time where, instead of shrinking, I can expand and grow larger.

That’s fascinating. You created Milly, and she gave you permission and taught you something. 

Absolutely. Milly has things that she needs to learn for sure. Part of her journey in the book is learning what she owes to other people, including her vulnerability. And it’s not all about what she wants. But in some ways, she is kind of an aspirational character to me, who feels like she deserves things. I haven’t always felt that way in my life, and motherhood can make it really hard to think about what one needs and deserves when there’s so many social expectations of being a martyr when you’re a mother, and also when you have a child whose needs are so huge.

Can you talk about Val, who so desperately tries to hold it together for herself and her family. But she is increasingly being failed by her partner, Nick. There’s only so much a woman can take.

I’ll tell you something funny. I had two different readers respond to Val’s husband. One said to me, ‘Nick is terrible, and Val should get a divorce.’ And someone else said to me, ‘I think we’re all married to Nick’—and she was talking about women married to cis men, saying they’re all a variant of Nick. With her marriage I was trying to capture something that I see is very common, and that there’s increasing public conversation about, which is great: unfair division of domestic labor at home, mental labor, emotional labor, and showing the incredible toll of that on Val. What it means to not just be the primary caregiver, but to have a partner who is not showing up for her and for the family life.

It’s emotionally burdensome. When you don’t have help, it does have implications for your sleep and your ability to take care of yourself. It compromises Val’s ability to write and make money as a journalist, but it also makes her feel abandoned, which brings up all of Val’s abandonment issues with her family of origin. I wanted to convey the pain of that. Not just an unfairness, although it is unfair, but what that does emotionally and psychologically to a new mother.

The novel travels back and forth in time. I wanted to ask about Helene, who feels like a shadowy figure in the present time chapters. Does Helene carry any symbolism for you? What can you share about Helene as a character, and what both her absence and lingering presence mean in both Milly and Val’s lives?

Helene is this interesting mixture of a friend and a surrogate mother figure. She has a friendship with the girls, but she’s older. She is wealthier. She’s more worldly. So she’s not on the same level as them in many ways. She has a lot of advantages and privileges that they don’t. She’s also a white woman. I wanted to write about what implications that has for a friendship—the kinds of hierarchies and power dynamics that are part of that. 

I also wanted to write about a trio, and how two people can relate differently when there’s someone else in the friendship. And Helene both facilitates Val and Milly’s friendship and helps them come together and open up to each other. But she also complicates it, because there’s a question of where everybody’s loyalty is that later echoes in their relationship with Cleo, a younger woman who they hire to be their nanny to take care of their daughters.

What do you hope readers take away from Take What You Can?

I hope that readers will leave the book thinking about what it really takes to be someone’s person through all the phases of life, and ask themselves: How do you stay close to someone when your lives take different paths? How do you stay close to someone when something in your own life changes your capacities, like becoming a parent? How do you stay close to someone when there are things that you don’t know how to talk about? 

We can be tempted to talk about friendship as easy in comparison to other relationships, like romantic partnerships or the relationship between parents and their children. But I think any really deep, intimate relationship is going to be complicated and require work to sustain. And I hope that readers will leave the book thinking about the difficulty of that work, but also the beauty of it.

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About the Author: Naima Coster is a New York Times bestselling author and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her novel What’s Mine and Yours was a Read with Jenna pick and named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, Esquire, Marie Claire, and more. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, Time, and The Cut. Her first novel, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist and writer. Her debut book, Bodega Stories, will be published in September 2026 from the University Press of Florida. You can follow her work at amariscastillo.com.