One of the strangest feelings is reading fiction by someone you know. You may keep looking for flashes of recognition, while more and more layers of that person are being revealed. Tendon’s Editor-at-Large Iro Filippaki has only met author Lucy Ellmann a handful of times in her life, but her consideration for others and incisive humor always manage to shine through her oeuvre. In her encyclopedic novel Ducks, Newburyport—shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize—Ellmann speaks through an anxious protagonist who seemingly cares about everything. In late 2025, Ellmann and Filippaki spoke together about the politics of care in relation to her work, and possible modes of resistance in our current world.

Iro Filippaki (IF): In many of your works, and in your 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport especially, you write about women who care. Your protagonist in Ducks is caring, and there’s also the parabolic interjections of the lioness that cares for her cubs. How easy is it for you to write about care?

Lucy Ellmann (LE): Pretty easy, I guess—since it’s all around us. Women risk ostracism if they don’t care enough. They get the cold shoulder. A bad mother is the lowest wretch. We’re supposed to worry about everybody all the time, or else.

There’s pressure to care for men in particular, not just one man but essentially all men—to give them succor, shelter, the better cuts of meat, the biggest pieces of pie, the floor, center stage, a place by the fire, the best seat at the table, a better education, the benefit of the doubt, prenups, and Nobel Peace Prizes. From fathers, brothers, husbands and sons to utter strangers, women placate men, soothe them, stir them, massage their egos, and sew their buttons on—all while buttoning up our own opinions.

The narrator in Ducks has absorbed this lesson and taken it further, spreading her magnanimity to her children, to restaurant owners, to oppressed segments of the population (she’s rightly horrified by the history of Native American persecution), to cats, and at times to the natural world, when she remembers it exists. She seemingly has no time to think productively about herself or her own situation as an American woman oppressed by consumerism, climate change, guns, the beauty cult, and the hideous obscenity of the U.S. health system (which has pushed her family into debt).

She’s privately deluged by thoughts and memories, some of which she tries to repress, especially if they seem rebellious, political, or impolite. So she’s not being kind to herself—or really to the world, which badly needs our help. Her compassion fails her in relation to the wider picture, and her own pain. There is one other person she can’t bring herself to help, and that’s Ronny—a dumb, scary, right-wing bigot. He’s not just irritating, he’s a threat to all the things she does hold dear: life, family, hope, and pie.

While catering to the wishes of everybody else, she treats her own needs as irrelevant. Her sex life, for instance. Her social life too—stuck in a rural backwater, cooking all day and driving around, she’s alone much of the time and lonely. She’s alone like the lioness. But the lioness isn’t lonely, she’s completely self-sufficient and has a sense of purpose: finding her cubs.

Her husband Leo is wearing himself out, commuting. They’re both like hamsters running in their wheels, at the mercy of America’s whims, which aren’t pretty.

IF: In my Glasgow days, I remember making a social call on your home…

LE: It was so nice that you came!

IF: It was such a great day! I recall that you were spending the day isolated, writing Ducks (on a typewriter, too?). I remember feeling so inspired by that writing process, and a little bit jealous, because I could never just let go of whatever caring responsibilities I had (real or imagined). How was the process of writing this mammoth of a novel? Do you actually remember writing it?

LE: I’m devoid of social aplomb and not much use to anybody, so I feel I’m sparing people—not neglecting them—by concentrating on my work. Sometimes I’m torn between writing and being a good friend, mother, sister, and wife who answers every email and attends to everybody’s goings-on, invites people over and dresses up and makes nice and sends Christmas cards out on time. But I’m shy, easily hurt, prone to faux pas, anxieties, and regrets, and can’t even hear very well if there’s any peripheral noise. As I noticed even as a child, I get burnt out by too much social life. These are all excellent incentives to stay at the desk! And this is the only way novels get written. I don’t know if this job is either enviable or admirable, but it suits my many incapacities. I’ve sucked at every other job I ever had. I was particularly lousy as a carer, incidentally. I didn’t neglect my charge—a bossy, bedridden woman who repaired watches—but I did spiral quickly into despair. I had to quit within a few days.

As for the process of writing Ducks, it was an intense labor, involving 14-hour days by the end, and it really required a lot of attention. I had to keep so many elements of the novel in my head at once that I think I may have injured my brain. My husband Todd McEwen is also a novelist, so luckily he understood. He now says—jokingly—that I was absent for seven years. It didn’t feel like that to me. I was aware of his presence, and grateful for it. In fact, his care provided the perfect environment in which to write. He did most of the cooking too!

The more a book seems to be coming into shape, the more one worries about not finishing it—by dying before it’s completed, losing it somehow, losing the flow or the drive to finish it. You have to keep renewing your own enthusiasm for the project. I was lucky to have friends and family who left me to it, and neighbors who sheltered my hard-drive and the manuscript of the work-in-progress whenever I had to be away.

Alas, I didn’t use a typewriter that time. Ducks was my first experience of writing a novel wholly on a computer. I resent computers in almost all ways. They are ridiculous, heartless, uncaring devices designed by and for teenagers. But that novel couldn’t have been done on a typewriter. It was too vast, and I had to be able to search it easily and scoot around between repeated phrases and references all over the place.

The only thing I like about computers is how quiet they are. When you use a typewriter, everyone in the building has to know about it.

IF: I’ve often said that if I teach a course on feminism(s), half of it will be based on your female protagonists. Was writing such strong female leads your vision from the start of your writing career? To what extent are you writing aspects of yourself, and your own negotiations with care?

LE: I’m very flattered. I think you should teach that course!

I don’t know if my female protagonists are all that strong. I’m sure my first novel was criticized for the passivity of its heroine. But passive heroines are useful as observers of stuff. I had no ‘vision.’ I always just wrote what I could write.

To me, my novels don’t seem all that similar. I spend a good amount of time trying to forget the last book before I can embark on another. But inevitably there are similarities, and feminism is vital to anything I write. The harshness of the female world interests me. I was brought up in a feminist household. My mother’s witty and groundbreaking Thinking About Women (1968) skewered the way male writers and critics approach writing by women. She was unable to write any further books due to illness, so I think maybe I unconsciously carried on her work—in my way. My sister Maud Ellmann has too, as a literary scholar; feminism is a family cause.

As for autobiographical aspects, apart from my first novel Sweet Desserts (1988), I haven’t deliberately tried to write about myself. And even in that book, I was using aspects of my life as material for fiction; I never meant it as autobiography. The heroine in my second book is a prissy, misguided virgin whom I mock relentlessly. I felt quite separate from her. Dot, the heroine of Dot in the Universe (2003), is reincarnated at one point as an opossum. As far as I know, this never happened to me personally. And the narrator of Ducks is not me at all. She’s much, much pleasanter than I am; I’m pretty angry most of the time. But I did gather material from my own thoughts to use as hers, as an example of what goes on inside one’s head.

I wasn’t consciously aware of writing about care until you pointed it out. But I think that theme can probably be found in most novels about women, no? Poor ducks.

IF: You create worlds in which despair and humor, devastation and hope, co-exist—often on the same page. Is this a conscious choice?

LE: People without a sense of humor don’t seem whole people. The same goes for books. It’s a writer’s duty, I think, to give the reader a laugh or two. The writer owes the reader that. And humor adds depth to tragedy, it doesn’t subtract from it.

Hope, on the other hand, is just a bad habit that’s stupidly hard to break. It pops up out of nowhere for no reason. We’ve entered the end of nature, the end of human civilization. What’s all this hope hanging around for? I once had hope that something of human culture could be salvaged from the apocalypse, that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Rembrandt, Verdi, the pyramids, pottery, textiles, languages, cuisines, customs, and sentiment could survive for future generations. Bach at least! But we’re in the hands of such a dangerous bunch of nutcases now—from politicians, polluters, and tech bros, to deepfake AI criminals and deluded guys with guns—that it seems unrealistic, if not inhumane, to hope for any rosy outcome. That’s patriarchy and late capitalism for you. But I’m not leaving without a joke or two.

IF: Thinking about the protagonist of Ducks, we live in a world where the family unit (and not only that) is sustained though gendered aspects of care. What would it take to change that? What could the family look like if that kind of care wasn’t the glue that binds everything together?

LE: Matriarchy! It makes much more sense biologically, psychologically, and sexually, that women should be esteemed, encouraged, and heard—rather than reviled, mocked, badgered, silenced, and sent out for cigs or willy-nilly to insane asylums. Matriarchy is how the human race first survived as a species. Women needed peaceful societies in which to raise children. They later developed agriculture, the arts, and justice. Men under matriarchy served women, tended and respected them, as is their natural biological function.

The matrilineal, matrilocal culture of the Nair community in India’s Kerala, and the Mosuo people in China—still in existence—give a hint of what matriarchy might look like today. Property is inherited by the women. Mosuo women are not betrothed or beholden to their sexual partners. The men get some political power, but no say in how the women spend their time, and no rights as fathers. Instead of ruling the roost, ordering women about, and making asses of themselves, Mosuo men content themselves with work and civic duties—and the occasional consensual fling. At home, they help bring up their sisters’ children.

Monogamy is unusual in most species, and within matriarchies. The original purpose of marriage in the West was to protect male supremacy; it’s all about money. (Given that monogamy was all their idea, it’s surprising how many men now seem to balk at getting hitched!)

The solution? I spelled it out pretty clearly in my novel, Mimi (2013). Admitting that patriarchy is a doomed system from which they have unfairly benefited, men should immediately give up all their money, property and allegiance to a woman or women. Then they should shut up and let women try to fix the mess men have left us with. Men can devote themselves from then on to pleasuring women and drinking beer.

Whatever women would do with their newfound dominance couldn’t possibly be worse than what men have done with theirs. Look at the hellhole they’ve made of a formerly habitable planet! The wars, the famines, the ugliness, the neglect, the befouled waters, the melting icebergs, the cruelty, the sadism, the male love of death and plastics…while sunbathing despots and billionaires blithely chomp on their cigars. It’s infuriating. I think matriarchy’s well worth a try.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Lucy Ellmann’s last novel Ducks, Newburyport was followed by Things Are Against Us, a collection of essays.

Iro Filippaki, Editor-at-Large, is a medical humanities scholar at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches Comparative Literature.