Sandra Tyler Explores the Intimate Ties That Bind in Memoir and Fiction

PHOTO: Award-winning author and editor Sandra Tyler, founder of The Woven Tale Press and author of The Night Garden: of My Mother

Navigating Motherhood, Memory, And The Art Of Letting Go

Award-winning author Sandra Tyler reflects on caregiving, creative structure, and the powerful emotional terrain of mother-daughter relationships through memoir and fiction, shaped by personal insight and literary finesse.

Sandra Tyler is an author of remarkable literary depth whose exploration of familial bonds resonates with emotional candour and narrative precision. Her most recent work, The Night Garden: of My Mother, is a searing memoir that navigates the complexities of caregiving, grief, and identity with the same clarity and grace that defined her earlier novels Blue Glass and After Lydia. A New York Times Notable author and founder of The Woven Tale Press, Tyler has shaped both the literary and artistic spheres with her editorial acumen and storytelling craft. Whether writing fiction or memoir, her reflections on mother-daughter relationships — drawn from deeply personal experience yet rendered with universal relevance — establish her as a vital voice in contemporary literature.

Sandra Tyler writes with piercing honesty, emotional clarity, and a profound understanding of familial bonds and the human condition.

Your most recent book is memoir. Can you share insights into the creative process in the writing of ‘The Night Garden: of My Mother’, and how it differs from your fiction writing?

The Night Garden was finally so much harder to write than my novels, even though the subject was right there in front of me – it was lived. What was most difficult was finding the structure – writing of scene comes naturally to me, and many of these moments I dramatized through the years as they were happening. I think I knew I had strong material here, even if it was hard to write. At the same time, in the writing, I was able to objectify in a way that offered me a layer of emotional protection—The Night Garden  chronicles my mother’s final years, and the harder that things became for me us both, the more I wished I could distance myself from it all. I finally solved the structural problems by giving in to my natural inclination: to think as a novelist. And so I was able to see a real arc within that time frame. Not exactly plot, but certainly there was a denouement.

“The Night Garden was finally so much harder to write than my novels, even though the subject was right there in front of me – it was lived.” – Sandra Tyler

The Night Garden chronicles a period in your life when you were deeply divided between your roles as a mother and daughter, by both distance and powerful emotional pulls. Why do you think this was an important story to tell?

Birthrates have fallen in every age group except for women in their 40s,  and I was one of these women. Granted, my situation was an extreme, as my mother too had me in her forties, (which, back in the 1960s, was not the norm). So she was already well into her 80s when I had my children. But  in response to Night Garden, I have heard from so many middle-aged women who are going through something similar — caring for aging parents while either balancing children a full-time job, or both. And no matter how many siblings you may have, the bulk of caregiving seems usually to fall to one child. And that one child, like me, probably strives to do everything they can to allow for their parents to live out their lives in their own home. I was fortunate enough to be able to hire a live-in aide her last two years, though at an extraordinary cost — if she had lived longer, it very well could have drained her entire savings.

What inspired you to explore the complex mother-daughter relationship in your novels, particularly in ‘Blue Glass’ and ‘After Lydia’?

The mother/daughter theme has always been central to my writing, though in many ways, when it came to writing the novels, it was subconscious – In Blue Glass, I naturally fell into the first-person perspective of an only child; which I am. But the mother in that novel is entirely fictional – I honestly don’t know where she came from, as she is the complete opposite “character” of my mother. But what I do think I pulled from—again, subconsciously—was the integral bond between my mother and me; that intensity of love and devotion of the only daughter. In After Lydia, I set out to explore more the sisterly connection, but even though the mother, Lydia, is deceased, she still remains a most central character.

With your second novel, what challenges did you face while writing ‘After Lydia’, and how did you overcome them to craft the narrative?

The challenge with that novel, frankly, was that I had a deadline — when my first novel, Blue Glass, was published by Harcourt, I was signed on for a second contract. Blue Glass began as a series of stories — that I insisted were just that, until my MFA advisor at Columbia, convinced me that I was actually writing a novel. So in that sense, Blue Glass originated and developed much more organically; I discovered my characters as I was writing them. In writing After Lydia, there was a whole lot more pressure to produce. So I spent more time than I liked working on an outline. As I’m now embarking on my third novel, I’m finding myself returning to that organic process.

How do you approach character development, especially when portraying complex family dynamics in your novels?

As I embark on a new novel, I’m perhaps at my most ambitious — I’m interested in exploring the mother/daughter relationship from the perspective of three generations. But I do feel Im falling back into that trap of overthinking who I want these characters to be. All writers must struggle with the time element — we don’t want to waste our time on something we wind up scrapping. But to really get at the heart of your characters, you have to scrap — at least I do. So, presently, I am writing reams, all longhand, knowing most of it will not wind up in the final version. In fact, I may be moving away entirely from my generational “study,” into other relationships I hadn’t initially imagined at all. Ultimately, I need to work my way into my characters. They need to show me who they are. And the delight in this method is, daily, small nuggets of surprise — maybe only a few lines of dialogue. But ones that will prove the heart of something to be further mined and developed.

As the founder and editor-in-chief of ‘The Woven Tale Press’, how do you balance your roles as an author and editor, and how has this influenced your own writing?

I founded WTP thirteen years ago, when my boys were still little and my elderly mother began requiring more care. It was quite the balancing act. I started with only an editorial assistant — who is still with me today — and began consolidating a group of editors. The only real writing I was doing then, was about my mother. Truthfully, as a writer, I do view life events materially — aways seeking those standout moments, for both the nuanced and the dramatic. And in her final years, there were so many of those moments, especially as I had to pivot in my role as daughter — caregiving became necessitated, much as it was with my own children, and I grappled with missing my mother as Mom long before she was actually gone.