That's also an experience that shaped writing the Biographer's quest. It actually started as a strange little essay that I was writing, just for myself, about my experience with IVF and fertility stuff, as well as my experience earlier on, several years before I did become a mother, when I was trying to become a single mom right before I was with my husband. I wasn't so personally caught up in the fears that haunt her about whether or not she would have a child. Once I became a mom and was working in much smaller chunks of time, just logistically, I think I was able to roam around more and give more attention to the other central characters and have a little more distance from Ro’s (the Biographer's) quest, if that makes sense. One of the things that shifted is that when I was writing before I got pregnant, and when I was dealing with infertility and a lot of uncertainty about becoming a mother, I think that made me focus more on the Biographer's trajectory and on her grappling with both desperately wanting something and also questioning why she wants it. Leni Zumas: I think it must have in ways I'm not even necessarily conscious of.

Did your approach to any of the characters or the plot change at all after you became a mom? Rhianna Walton: I read in a prior interview that you started writing Red Clocks in 2010, before your son was born. We’re excited to present Red Clocks as Volume 71 of Indiespensable. Each choice is fraught, and intimately tied to a self-determination constantly under threat not just from lawmakers, but from our own flawed and evolving ideas of what a woman should be, or want. As the Mother, Mender, Daughter and Biographer show - in utterly compelling, distinct voices - there's no simple narrative governing the choice to carry, birth, abort, or adopt a child. Instead, Red Clocks provides an exquisite portrait of the internal legislation that governs motherhood - not the laws enacted in Congressional offices, but the unique joys and recriminations that occur inside of every woman who yearns for or experiences pregnancy and motherhood. Red Clocks is a novel about reproductive freedoms, but its primary concern is not politics. The Daughter seeks an abortion, and the Mender surreptitiously cares for the town's women while carrying secrets of her own. The Biographer researches the first female polar explorer and yearns for a child. In their small seaside town, the Mother raises her kids and envies the Biographer's freedom. Red Clocks, Leni Zumas’s fascinating second novel, follows four women, the Mender, the Mother, the Daughter, and the Biographer, as they move through the life stages of pregnancy, motherhood, and infertility.

Red clocks zumas