Chiara Di Lello is a writer whose recent chapbook, Childless Millennial, sketches the contours of a figure that has, over the course of the last few years, emerged at the center of a supercharged polemic: the unapologetically childfree adult. In the process, she throws into question notions of productivity, continuity, and social value: what does it mean to be biologically unproductive—nulliparous—in a society where political and social institutions have begun aggressively equating childbearing with virtue? What does it mean to deliberately put an end to generational cycles of succession? And, how might different poetic forms evoke the tensions at the heart of these questions? I sat down with Chiara Di Lello over Zoom to talk about the pitfalls of Millennial identity, Childless Disney Adults, and ever-present temptation to invoke Britney Spears. The following is a transcription of our conversation.
Do you mind saying a few words about your background in writing, how you came to writing poetry?
Poetry for me has been a constant for a long time. I’ve always gone to words first for processing the world and expressing myself.
I studied poetry in undergrad, but I didn’t declare an English major because I was interested in so many other things, too. And then unfortunately I listened to the wrong person and lost confidence in my own writing. I stopped “being” a writer, in the sense of taking my own work seriously, for about ten years, though I was always scribbling something somewhere.
In my mid-twenties I got my teaching degree and poured all my energy into the learning curve of being a good teacher, but I hit this point around my thirtieth birthday when I decided, enough, I’m gonna come back to poetry. COVID hit not long after that, and I was teaching fifth grade in just about every pandemic format you can imagine. I stepped back from full time teaching to recover from burnout and write. That was when I really had room to realize I wanted to put together a book. I’m enjoying this era of being able to make the book dream come true.
The question of the definition of a Millennial always emerges in any discussion where the term is raised. The first poem in the chapbook, “Self Portrait, 1999,” opens on the eve of the new millennium and describes the speaker as a pre-pubescent, perhaps a pre-teen beginning to come of age in her own body. Do you have a specific definition of what a Millennial is, what is the specific commonality that this cohort shares, what dates circumscribe the birthdates of its members, and do you think it matters?
Whenever I’m asked, I can’t come up with those exact numbers. I have to Google them every time. I think it’s specific experiences that bind millennials together. That poem references one big part: coming of age with Y2K. Otherwise, we would be called Generation Y, since we come after Gen X. So clearly the millennium has something to do with it. I would also say a Millennial is defined as coming of age with 9/11. It was a clear turning point in our young lives that we were old enough to remember. Beyond that, I think millennials have the common experience of delayed milestones. We entered the job market with the 2008 crash and precarious employment and doing the work “for the exposure.” This ended up delaying things like starting families and buying houses. One of the things I think about a lot is, what does it mean to grow up when the world is not ready to let you into adulthood, to let you have adult autonomy because of the economy and politics and all of these things beyond your control? So it’s those two things—the coming of age and the delayed milestones—that define it.
[W]hat does it mean to grow up when the world is not ready to let you into adulthood, to let you have adult autonomy because of the economy and politics and all of these things beyond your control?
Going back to that first poem in the chapbook, it ends with a line from the Britney Spears song, “baby one more time.” Can we unpack the decision to include these lyrics at the end of the first poem? It’s hard to ignore how Britney has become a sort of poster girl for the pitfalls of a very specific type of fame and celebrity.
One immediate, surface level read is that it has the word “baby” in it, and there is this idea in the poem of being a child versus adult. Some of the tenderness of that pre-teen age is that we go through this very adorable cosplay being teenagers before we’re anywhere near that actual age. Especially for someone raised as a girl and expected to grow up into a woman, whatever that means. There are so many expectations that get delivered so early and you absorb them before you even realize. So that lyric is so nostalgic, and it suggests so much more in terms of still being that kid self and not yet being the adult self.
Invoking Britney has only become more complicated and multi-dimensional over time. It’s interesting how we were just talking about millennials and delayed life milestones and autonomy—the whole idea of “Free Britney” is that until recently she didn’t have access to her autonomy [because of her father’s conservatorship]. So I don’t mind invoking that, even though I’m not the biggest expert on it. I don’t secretly have a whole “Free Britney,” presentation to give you!
When I was assembling this manuscript, I went back to those drafts and asked myself, does this belong here? Even if you leave aside the abusive conservatorship, 1999-era Britney still evokes that tension between childhood and adulthood and how it builds up in a person and erupts. The poem explores that moment when the young self understands, “I’m being perceived, I don’t know how I feel about being perceived. I’m also starting to perceive myself enough to feel self-conscious. What do I do with that energy?” That’s really the emotional heart of the poem.
Going back to the title of the chapbook, in some online spaces, you see a discourse of reclaiming the title “childless,” but also of using the alternate term “childfree” to steer the discourse in a different direction, one that emphasizes freedom rather than lack. What accounts for the deliberate use of the term Childless in the title of the text?
The title comes from the poem in the collection “Childless Millennial Considers Non-Attachment.” In both cases, the word choice is definitely a provocation. It’s not the word that I use for myself. I’m a childfree person and I’m childfree by choice, which is yet again a different experience from people who want to have children and aren’t able to, for whatever reason. But it is meant to be a little bit in-your-face. There is also a little bit of lore in terms of people reclaiming the phrase—I think it began among Disney adults. There was a post that went extremely viral a few years ago from a mom who was resentful of the Disney adults for clogging up the lines and taking up a lot of space at Disney World. Her perspective was that it was making it harder for her to have a nice weekend there with her toddlers. So people started making pins and t-shirts and Mickey Mouse hats that say “Childless Millennial” or “Childless Disney Adult.” I have to acknowledge my forebears! Me personally, I call myself “childfree,” but “childless” is in the title for a reason: it forces a confrontation. It takes up space. In being childless, we’ve defied this huge societal expectation, and we’re not even conforming to the expectation of seeing it as a lack.
I love the cover art on the chapbook. There’s a green faux mid-century modern loveseat and some houseplants in the water. Were you involved in the direction on the cover art at all?
Yes, I love the cover so much! The artist’s name is Mar Spragge , and they are an amazing watercolor artist. I got to brainstorm ideas and concepts with Mar, and this is what they came up with as a result. The chair references the title poem, and the buoys in the foreground reference a second poem in the collection called “Footprint.” I feel so lucky that I got to be that involved in the process, which is a huge plug for micropresses and places like Game Over Books that are small enough to make that possible. I really love and feel honored by this idea that a human read my poems and made a completely new piece of art based on them. So fuck AI and Long Live Mar Spragge!
You have a series of poems in the chapbook that are titled “Nulliparous.” What accounts for your decision to take up the Latin or the medical term for a woman who has never given birth?
We don’t have a word for a person who hasn’t given birth in terms of social role. We don’t have a word for a woman without children. Yet there are lots of stereotypes prepared for such a person: an old maid or a crone, I guess the most positive one would be an auntie, but not everybody who doesn’t have children identifies with auntie. I happen to. The lack of a social word led me to the medical word. “Nulliparous” is the word for someone who’s never given birth; “multiparous” means they’ve given birth multiple times.
The repeated title was a way of capturing and putting under an umbrella a handful of poems about facing down the expectation to bear children. “Nulliparous: Definitions” is one poem that speaks to the goal of the sequence. If you take the word back to its roots, “nulliparous” implies uselessness: someone who doesn’t create anything. Literally, having brought nothing into being. I object to the idea that not having children means you’re not creating or contributing anything. And so this set of poems is also about creativity and composing one’s own life when it doesn’t include biological children.
“[C]hildless” is in the title for a reason: it forces a confrontation. It takes up space. In being childless, we’ve defied this huge societal expectation, and we’re not even conforming to the expectation of seeing it as a lack.
You have at least three poems in the chapbook dedicated to the newborn children of friends or family members, with whom you’ve forged close bonds. Do you think that there is a misplaced social emphasis on childbearing vs. childrearing? In other words, when we talk about “nulliparous,” this is the specific medical term for a woman who has never given birth, but childbirth is not the only avenue that women take to become mothers. Neither does giving birth make one a mother. Do you think this slippage between concepts is meaningful?
For me, the big distinction between childbearing and childrearing is that if you look around in the United States on a policy level, we’re all about birthing more babies (specifically white babies), but we do not give a shit about mothers and children once they’re born. On a policy level, we neglect and underfund and punish. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. have been rising since 2000 and remain twice as high for Black mothers compared to white. That’s to say nothing of the new horrors post-Roe .
In the face of that, I am not at all invested in personally gestating or birthing, but I care ferociously about building a society that actually cares for parents and children—which means implementing things like real parental leave, universal healthcare and childcare, properly funded schools, and so on.
Childrearing as a practice is wonderful because it’s collective, when not done in the individualist capitalist mess. I learned from the book Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs that every mammalian subgroup has allomothers: mothers other than biological mothers helping to raise the baby. All mammals do this—humans are the ones who have gotten the most divorced from this, especially since industrialization. So, allomothering and care beyond the nuclear family are very energizing to me and exciting.
Here in the United States, we’ve witnessed over the course of the past four years, the overturning of the landmark decision Roe v. Wade, replaced by the Dobbs decision that remands the power to regulate abortion access back to the states. We’ve seen the rise of the figure of the tradwife on social media, and we’ve seen an increase in pro-natalist rhetoric, particularly coming out of the current administration. Do you view your own poetry in conversation with, as a riposte to this particular political moment?
Yes, absolutely. Let this be J.D. Vance’s least favorite book of all time. That is the goal. Going back to your question of why the word “childless”: If it’s a finger in the eye to anybody, it’s the pro-natalist and the tradwife movements that have nothing but regressive, oppressive ideas about what I’m supposed to be doing with my time and my body. I want the childfree perspective out there as a counter to all of that. Because it’s remarkable and concerning how quickly we went from previous waves of feminism demanding actual, material political and economic change to Taylor Swift or Beyonce era feminism-as-brand and Girlboss feminism-as-winning-at-capitalism, and now here we are. Suddenly people have lost the distinction between the idea that having choices is feminist versus the idea that any choice is feminist, which is a really important distinction for actually empowering women.
So, yes, Childless Millennial is definitely meant to strike back at pro-natalism and this deeply antifeminist moment. As a childfree person, I want us to do so much more to actually care for parents and children as a society. Choosing not to have children doesn’t mean that we don’t have skin in the game.
Not having children is a conscious choice to end certain negative generational cycles, but it brings up questions about culture, language and memory in turn.
Are there any writers, poets or otherwise, that you consider yourself in conversation with? Either as a millennial or as poets who are tackling these questions of what it means to be a woman or a person without a child.
I often have to be a detective and guess from one or two poems whether a poet might be Team Childfree. That’s led me to poet friends like Sarah Lyn Rogers and Ashna Ali, who both have poems that align with mine. I love talking to them about expectations around motherhood, auntiehood, and millennial life.
One poet I know of who has an entire collection about mothering creatures that are not her own children is Kai Coggin, who is a master naturalist and gardener. She has all of these animal and plant and insect children. Her poetry collection [Mother of Other Kingdoms] is amazing because it is very political. She writes about bodily autonomy, gun violence, and Palestine, but also about what it means to care for and nurture her students and community and the world. Jane Huffman also has an amazing poem about wanting a bisalp (surgical sterilization), and not wanting children is a strong theme in her most recent book [Public Abstract].
Then there are millennial writers who have a really great grasp on the absurd alienation of 21st century life. I think of Alina Pleskova and Alina Stefanescu, who was one of my blurbers.
There’s also this thread of refuting expectations and how that interacts with culture and generational cycle-breaking. My book is about being childfree but also has a lot to say about my Ukrainian mother and grandmother. That’s a connection I see in Leslie Sainz’s work about Cuban-American identity, and in Ashna’s work as well. Not having children is a conscious choice to end certain negative generational cycles, but it brings up questions about culture, language and memory in turn.
You use a variety of form throughout the chapbook, most inventively perhaps in “What I Didn’t Know How to Say in the Ann Taylor Loft Dressing Room,” after Hanif Abdurraqib. Can you talk a little about your use of form in the chapbook?
I’m a bit of a form geek. I love how different forms each bring a certain structure and energy to the poem, and I try to match the form to the emotional content. One example is a pantoum I wrote about disordered eating. The cycling and repetition of the pantoum really seemed to resonate with the little mental loops that you get into in terms of thinking obsessively about food and body image. It’s its own little closed circle. There’s a sestina in the book called “Child of Thirst.” Sestinas, you know, they’re long, they’re tiring, they’re an acquired taste. But it made sense for a poem about generations of distance and closeness and physical touch between mother and child: what it means to have tenderness and comfort from your own mother, and what it means to not have that when you need it. That draft stayed a sestina because it matched that energy of a long and slow process. The poem you mentioned, “What I Didn’t Know How to Say…” didn’t start out visual, but I think what helped it in becoming a concrete visual poem is that the closed doors on the page show the blockedness between me and my mother in that moment in a dressing room, and also the finality of my grandmother dying. The visual form allows the poem to be both the words on the page and something closed off and maybe hidden behind them, adding on to that sense of what I didn’t know how to say. Both parts are doing work, the visual arrangement and the words themselves are doing work.
What’s next? Do you have anything planned in terms of publications or speaking events moving forward?
So, I wrote the motherhood manuscript and immediately jumped to writing about my father’s side, my Italian-American side. It’s a hybrid collection of more visual and collage based poems. I’ve been using family photos and historic documents to unpack the specific kind of acculturation for Italian Americans that led to whiteness. You can ask of any group in the United States that’s non-indigenous and European, “When did your people become white?” And the answer for Italians is somewhat later than some groups and somewhat earlier than other groups. But this process of accessing whiteness is a trade-off of culture, language, ways of being, memory. You trade those things away, you suppress them, or you circumscribe them in order to receive those whiteness privileges. I’m writing about what was lost and the violence done in turn to self and others as the cost of accessing that whiteness. It’s a huge topic, but I’m trying to figure out how it lives in me, personally, and distill it into a whole bunch of poems.
And for Childless Millennial, I have some readings coming up in and around New York and Connecticut this spring, hopefully Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as well. I’ll be doing some online readings too. I’m always excited to connect with people who connect with the poems. Childfree folks, come on out!
Childless Millennial is now available from Game Over Books.
Chiara Di Lello is a queer writer, artist, and teacher who unequivocally supports the movement for Palestinian liberation. Her debut chapbook Childless Millennial is out now from Game Over Books. Chiara is a Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net finalist, and curates Childfree Chats, an online series of print and video interviews with childfree people. She was born and raised in New York City but now lives up the Hudson River, where she spends her spare time lifting heavy sh*t, trying to be a better gardener, and spoiling her friends’ kids.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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