Citing author Cris Mazza as her creative muse and mentor, Wycoff noted, "she helped me see that the disparate single-mother stories I'd written could be linked." Wycoff explained, "In a linked-story format, I can present other points of view as short pieces of contrast. I wanted to structure the book so that it begins and ends with a death, because I wanted it to read as a cycle. Linearity, to me, seems more of a construct than cycles." She told "Time Out Chicago", "The second I wrote when my son was two years old. I wrote it, in part, in reaction to all of the sentimental, dreamy writing about motherhood." Noting that most writing about motherhood is "so ebullient and romantic", Wycoff told "The Stranger" that "there are a lot of mothers out there who don't feel that way about motherhood at all."