Go down the stairs of a two-story brick house in Boro Park, Brooklyn, and you reach a room that does not exist. A seamstress keeps it. She is sixty, childless, married a long time to a retired schoolteacher who lives at the top of the same stairs and rarely comes down. Women come instead. They come for a bra that will not leave red marks, and they stay for the talk. The seamstress measures a back with a tape and a glance and names a size before the customer has unbuttoned her blouse. She knows the brides by the green-strapped demi-cup they choose and the widows by the plain white they no longer bother to replace. She fits the body and reads the life. Upstairs her husband calls down that he did not notice she had gone.<\/p>\n
The room is the lingerie shop in Ilana Stanger-Ross<\/a>‘s first novel, Sima’s Undergarments for Women, and it is the best way into her work, because everything she has written since happens in a version of it: a small space, run by a woman, where strangers undress and confess, and where the labor of care goes on below the line of sight. Stanger-Ross (b. 1975) built her career in that basement and then walked up the stairs and out the door into a second vocation that turns out to be the same one. She delivers babies. She has spent two decades attending women at the threshold the seamstress can only mourn.<\/p>\n She was born in Brooklyn and raised inside its Jewish world. She took a bachelor’s degree at Barnard College<\/a>, then a master’s in fiction at Temple University<\/a> in Philadelphia, where she held a University Fellowship. The early grants came in a steady line, the kind that mark a young writer the field has decided to watch: the Leeway Foundation<\/a>, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a residency at Ragdale<\/a>, a Timothy Findley Fellowship. Her short fiction appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review and Lilith<\/a>. Her essays and journalism ran in The Globe and Mail<\/a>, The Walrus<\/a>, The Literary Review of Canada, and the online magazine Killing the Buddha. She married the historian Jordan Stanger-Ross, moved north, and settled in Victoria, British Columbia, the small capital city on Vancouver Island<\/a> where she still lives.<\/p>\n The marriage put two writers under one roof who study the same thing from opposite ends. Jordan Stanger-Ross teaches history at the University of Victoria<\/a> and works on migration, race, and what governments take from people. In 2009, the year his wife published her novel about a woman’s private loss, he published Staying Italian with the University of Chicago Press<\/a>, a study of immigrant neighborhoods in Toronto and Philadelphia. He went on to direct Landscapes of Injustice, the large public project on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, and the Crown honored him in the House of Commons<\/a> with a national research award. He writes about loss as a matter of record, deeds and seized property and the apology that comes too late. She writes about loss as a matter of the body, a child who never arrives, a marriage that goes quiet. The same grief, told from the archive and from the bed.<\/p>\n Sima’s Undergarments for Women came out in hardcover from the Overlook Press in 2009, with the Penguin paperback close behind. The launch happened at Dale’s Gallery on Fisgard Street, in the few blocks of Victoria’s Chinatown. The bookseller from Cadboro Bay Books, Amber Rider, made the introduction. The crowd filled the gallery and bought every copy on the table before the reading was through, and the store ran out. Stanger-Ross was thirty-three. She had written, at that age, a sixty-year-old woman so complete that reviewers reached for Amy Bloom<\/a> (b. 1953) and Alice McDermott<\/a> (b. 1953) to place her.<\/p>\n The novel earns those names through patience. It runs a little past three hundred pages and almost nothing happens, by the standards of plot. Sima Goldner fits bras. Her oldest friend Connie, loud and married to a lawyer named Art who keeps his own secrets, cannot understand why Sima has stayed sad so long. Then a young Israeli woman, Timna, walks in looking for a demi-cup, takes the job of seamstress, and stays. Sima falls into something close to love. Not romance, though the feeling carries romance’s whole weather, the fascination and the jealousy and the storing up of a smile to keep for later. Timna becomes the daughter Sima could not have. The reader sits inside Sima’s head the entire time, in a close third person so tight it reads like confession, and watches her see herself the way the customers see her and the way she fears they do. Stanger-Ross cooks the small scenes at full heat. Sima makes a Rosh Hashanah dinner large enough to feed an army for one young guest, and Lev teases her for it, and the over-cooking says more about her hunger than any speech could.<\/p>\n The critics split along an honest line, and the split is worth keeping in view. Publishers Weekly<\/a> called the book more than a novel of female friendship and praised its verve. Booklist<\/a> and Library Journal<\/a> went warm. Kirkus<\/a> admired the texture of the shop and then said the quiet part, that a heroine this sorry for herself is hard to like. Entertainment Weekly<\/a> loved the character and felt cheated by the ending, which withholds the revelation about Timna that the reader has been trained to expect. Both complaints point at the same choice. Stanger-Ross refuses the payoff. She keeps the camera on Sima and lets Timna stay a partial figure, because the book is about the woman who watches, not the woman watched. A reader who wants a secret unsealed will close the book unsatisfied. A reader who wants to understand how a person survives her own disappointment will find few debuts that go deeper.<\/p>\n The same year and the years just after, Stanger-Ross trained as a midwife, taking a degree in the subject from the University of British Columbia<\/a>. She did not leave writing for medicine. She carried one into the other. Her short fiction kept appearing; she contributed a story, “Anna & Patrick,” to a limited-edition anthology the Strand bookstore commissioned with Kate Spade New York, seven women asked to fold a single line into a story of their own. But the center of her life moved to the birthing room.<\/p>\n Consider a scene she would know in her hands. A first-time mother labors in her own bedroom in Victoria, the lamp low, the partner useless and trying, the hours stacking up past the point where fear arrives. The midwife sits on the floor. She does not rush the room. She checks the heartbeat, names what the body is doing in plain words, tells the mother that the pain has a shape and a use, that the work is normal even when it does not feel survivable. This is the part of medicine the textbooks rank below the clinical readings, and it is the part Stanger-Ross treats as the craft. One of her husband’s doctoral students, thanking his advisor in a dissertation, recorded that the historian’s partner, Ilana, a midwife, delivered the student’s first child, a service he noted the acceptance letter had not promised. The detail is small and tells the truth of the household. The work crosses the desk and the kitchen and the birthing room without changing its nature.<\/p>\n That synthesis became a book. A Is for Advice (The Reassuring Kind): Wisdom for Pregnancy appeared in 2019, a small illustrated gift volume organized through the alphabet, C for Control, F for Fear, W for Water. The guide makes one argument against the whole genre it belongs to. The pregnancy shelf runs on fear and on the worst-case search at two in the morning. Stanger-Ross writes the opposite. She treats birth as a normal event of the body, asks the expectant mother to trust herself, and stays out of the wars between the home birth and the scheduled cesarean, the epidural and the unmedicated labor, the breast and the bottle. She takes no side in those fights and hands the woman the authority to choose. The physician and author Gabor Mat\u00e9<\/a> (b. 1944) blessed it in a blurb. Readers who wished they had read it during their own first weeks said so in the reviews. The tone is the best-friend blogger; the spine underneath is clinical and feminist.<\/p>\n Across both careers the subject holds. Stanger-Ross writes about care, the work mostly done by women and mostly unseen, and about the rooms where it happens. Her Jewish material comes through community and family custom and the obligations one person owes another, not through theology argued from a podium. Her people stand between independence and duty, the life they wanted and the family they have, the tradition they keep and the modern world that keeps pulling. She holds the camera close and lets the large questions rise out of the small ones, a woman’s body, a friendship, a fitting in a basement, a heartbeat found again on the monitor.<\/p>\n Her published output stays slim. One novel, one pregnancy guide, a scatter of stories and essays across two decades, set beside a full clinical practice with The Midwives Collective in Victoria and the raising of two daughters, Eva and Tillie. She keeps a website that introduces her as both novelist and midwife and refuses to rank the two. As of 2026 she still attends births and still writes, and treats each calling as the other’s teacher.<\/p>\n The place she has made is narrow and her own. She sits in the line of contemporary Canadian Jewish letters, and she sits outside the usual literary economy, a working clinician who publishes when the work demands it rather than when the market does. The basement shop and the birthing room turn out to be one room seen twice. A woman comes in frightened of her own body. Someone who has done this many times sits down beside her, takes a measure with a tape or a hand, names the thing without flinching, and stays until the worst of it passes. Stanger-Ross built that room in fiction first, then spent her life walking into the real one.<\/p>\n March 20, 2009<\/p>\n I read this new novel<\/a> straight through last Shabbat.<\/p>\n I loved its story about an old life redeemed by a beautiful girl.<\/p>\n I interviewed the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross<\/a>, on March 19.<\/p>\n Luke: "When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "In what point in childhood would that be? I remember wanting to be a secretary, pretty terrible career ambitions for the daughter of a feminist. At some point, I wanted to be a writer. So there you go."<\/p>\n Luke: "About what age?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I remember being in sixth grade when I was eleven years old, and my teacher had a recorder and she just played a tape and the tape was the sound of falling rain. She had us write. I wrote a truly ridiculous piece looking back. I wrote from the perspective of an old homeless man. I was an eleven-year-old upper-middle-class kid. But I thought it was pretty fabulous. More than that, I was enchanted by writing. From that point on, I took that as part of my identity."<\/p>\n Luke: "Where were you in the social pecking order in high school?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "It’s funny. I saw that you had asked that to a few people<\/a>. I was trying to think how I would describe myself. I wasn’t particularly cool. It’s pretty weird though. If you had asked me a year ago, I would’ve said, oh, I was totally uncool in high school. I kinda wanted to be a rebel. I didn’t do anything rebellious, but I just had the attitude, ‘I’m too smart for this. These people are all idiots. I’m really the cool one even though socially I feel totally awkward day to day.’<\/p>\n "But then the strange thing is Facebook, right? Now I have all these high school friends on Facebook<\/a> and it makes me rethink who I was in high school. I feel like so many people remember me from high school that I seem to have way more friends in high school than I remembered. I kinda left high school and thought, ‘I’m never thinking about that period of my life every again.’ And really didn’t. Now all of a sudden, high school has a totally different feeling to me because all of these very friendly people are friends with me on Facebook. I don’t really know any more what I was like in high school. Trying to be the rebel but not really succeeding."<\/p>\n Luke: "Has your place in the social pecking order changed over time?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I’m a lot more confident than I was back then. I went to a big public school in Brooklyn, Midwood. I’m surrounded by such different people now. It’s a whole different culture."<\/p>\n Luke: "I was the class clown, an anarchic influence. And that hasn’t changed. Are you more of an observer? A participant? An organizer? Do you put people together? I’m trying to picture you in a group of people."<\/p>\n Ilana: "In those ways, I’m similar. I’m an organizer. I take a lot on. I talk out of turn a fair bit. I’m pretty nerdy. I’ve always done my homework and couldn’t resist answering questions if I knew the answer."<\/p>\n Luke: "Has your happiness level been pretty constant over the span of your life?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "Yes. I’m a pretty stable, pretty happy, person. I’ve had it pretty easy. I haven’t had to face any kind of crisis situation. I was raised by parents who made me feel loved. Anyone who does art has that kind of darkness that they go to but my darkness is pretty tame."<\/p>\n Luke: "Where does the publication of your book rank among the things you are happiest and proudest of?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I worked on that novel for years. I began it seven years ago. I am sure I am not along here — there’s ambivalence with publication. It can be almost difficult to return to it and to see it out there. I like looking at it in a book store but then opening it and reading it, I find quite difficult.<\/p>\n "You’re always looking up to the next level. I’m looking at your website at some of those writers<\/a> and I don’t feel at all that I’ve arrived.<\/p>\n "The flip side of that is that I have two young daughters. For them I’m proud and happy every day. That’s much more tangible."<\/p>\n Luke: "I’ve been struck in my interviews how for those who’ve never married, publication of their book tends to be the greatest thing they’ve ever done. For those who have married, let alone have children, it ranks down there."<\/p>\n Ilana: "A book doesn’t hug you at the end of the day, right?<\/p>\n "I’m a fulltime student midwife. Some of the people who know me from that have no idea that I’ve written anything."<\/p>\n "I’m able to compartmentalize pretty well. I’m so busy, [a bad review] doesn’t ruin things. I don’t have the time to think about that."<\/p>\n "Every book has its weaknesses and authors are more aware of its weaknesses than anybody else."<\/p>\n Luke: "What have you found most interesting about the reactions you’ve received to the book?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "The whole time I was writing this novel, the whole time I felt I was writing a fairly depressing, fairly dark book. The one perspective we get is Sima. Most of it takes place in a basement bra shop, so it’s a bit claustrophobic. And sad. I thought it was this dark sad book about this woman who was quite alienated from her needs and desires. She’d experienced infertility. She had never forgiven herself. Then this very strange relationship with this young woman. It has aspects of mother-love and aspects of lust and desire and obsession. To me it is a strange sad book. For me, the strength of it was that it was very internal. For a reader who enjoys that, we don’t always get books that are so internal with the way our minds really work, with all the things we wouldn’t really admit.<\/p>\n "Certainly trying to get it published was difficult. I kept hearing from publishers, well, I loved it but I can’t sell it. It’s not enough of a page turner.<\/p>\n "What’s been interesting to me has been things like Entertainment Weekly. Getting a few of these reviews where I’ve written a page turner. People I’m not close to writing to me, ‘I loved your book! It was so fun! I zipped right through it! I couldn’t put it down!’<\/p>\n "It’s just so odd to me. Really, was it fun? It’s got the pink cover. Because of the bra shop, there’s been an attempt to market it as chick-lit. I’ve done a lot of radio where it is said, ‘It is a book about women’s friendships set in a bra shop.’<\/p>\n "To some extent, I’ve played into that. Certainly I have because you want your book to sell. You want readers. On the other hand, are you compromising yourself? Can women’s fiction not be taken seriously? What does this mean?<\/p>\n "Just that disconnect for me between what I thought I was writing and what has been received has been fascinating."<\/p>\n Luke: "What did happen to Timna? Did she have an abortion?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I will honestly tell you that I don’t know."<\/p>\n Luke: "I love that theme about how people can come into your life and play a redemptive role but you can’t idealize them as redeemers. That’s not all they are."<\/p>\n Ilana: "That’s right."<\/p>\n Luke: "I’m sure the desire to be rescued or turned around or changed or reborn or reinvigorated is certainly one that I experience. How did that theme of redemption come to you?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I had the setting of the bra shop before I had the characters. I pictured a couple both falling in love with this young assistant and then that changing their relationship."<\/p>\n "Casting Timna as an Israeli was interesting for me. I am an American Jew. I grew up in the Zionist youth movement (the left-wing socialist segment). I went to summer camp and learned all about Israel and did activities about when you make aliyah, where will you move to.<\/p>\n "When I was 18, I moved to Israel and lived on a kibbutz. Israel was the playground for American Jews. For right-wing American Jews, Israel is filled with machisimo, it’s where you get to fulfill aggressive fantasies through visions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For the 18-year old American Jew, they’re going there and they’re looking to have sex, right? Especially if you are a woman, the Israeli army guys.<\/p>\n "I was curious too about the way that Americans sexualize Israelis. For American Jews, Israel is our sexy other.<\/p>\n "Once Timna really became a character, I stopped thinking about that."<\/p>\n Luke: "What’s the story of you and God?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I don’t know. That one’s still being written. For a long time, I said I didn’t believe in God and I don’t really believe in God, but I do think that there is something worth honoring beyond ourself. I’m at births all the time. Miracle is such a cliche, but you are the first hands touching a baby being born. It’s an incredible place to be.<\/p>\n "Now that I’m a mother… It’s one thing to grow up Jewish and to take that thing for granted, but when you have kids, you have to figure out what is Judaism going to look like for our family. We don’t live in a Jewish place. I live in Victoria, British Columbia. So it’s not like it is in the air here the way it would be if I were raising my kids in New York. I feel like I have to think quite consciously about it. If they are going to think of themselves as Jewish, then that has to come from my husband and I. So we’re still figuring all of this out."<\/p>\n "I was flying from Victoria to New York There are no direct flights of course. We landed in Toronto and then we got on the plane to go to New York. I got on the plane and I looked down the aisle of the airplane and I thought, ‘People on this plane look like me.’<\/p>\n "It was so strange. It was just one of these visceral things that come to you. I hadn’t realized I was missing that."<\/p>\n "I grew up in Flatbush. I grew up going to stores with my mom where she knew the owners. She cashed her checks at the grocery store where they would pinch my cheeks and they’d give me cookies. I miss having something like that. It’s quite anonymous where I am. I miss that culture. At the same time, I don’t want to live in New York City. I love where we live. It’s fun to feel exotic."<\/p>\n Luke: "How do you feel about the Orthodox? Did you feel like they were constantly judging your Jewishness?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I didn’t grow up in Borough Park<\/a>. I grew up in Flatbush<\/a>. The street I grew up on was not at all Orthodox. There were a bunch of Jews on my street but also a bunch of African-American families. It was a block away from Ocean Avenue, which was mostly African-American. The first black family to move on to my family’s block was in the 1970s, shortly after we arrived. That was fine. It wasn’t like there any kind of neighborhood scene over that. But they moved away a few years ago and there was a rumor that a Hasidic family was moving in. My parents and other people on the street were really upset. ‘They’re going to put a shul in the basement! And then it is going to be crowded. And they’re going to be running businesses. There’s going to be no parking.’<\/p>\n "That was hilarious to see all these Jews, many non-Jews, getting upset because the black family was leaving and possibly Hasids were moving in.<\/p>\n "Growing up, I went to public school. I went to Hebrew school after school at a Conservative synagogue near us that had its own day school. Going to Hebrew school three days a week beginning when I was five and up until I got bat mitzvahed, it did feel like, here we were at their Hebrew school and yet always being made to feel that we weren’t quite with the righteous kids because we weren’t the day school kids.<\/p>\n "My father grew up Orthodox. He had left that. He sometimes would despair over how little we knew at the same time he had made that choice not to raise us Orthodox."<\/p>\n Luke: "How did college, particularly the MFA, affect your writing?"<\/p>\n Ilana: "I went to Barnard. I studied History. I assumed I’d be an English major and do all sorts of creative writing and it didn’t happen. I think I purposefully didn’t want to be in a creative writing class with a lot of other young women who I felt would be a lot like me. Looking back, I was probably wrong to feel that way. But that’s where I was coming from at that time. I took one writing class and I took it at the School of General Studies. It was a much more diverse group of people.<\/p>\n "The MFA I did at Temple University. It was the time to write. It was pretty huge. I was fully funded there. I didn’t want to go into debt for an MFA. I didn’t trust that that was a responsible position.<\/p>\n "I started working one-on-one with a professor there. I was developing this as a short story. He was the one who said to me, ‘Why isn’t this a novel?’ I’m not convinced that I would’ve written this as a novel if I hadn’t had that support. Having a deadline. Handing in work every week. Having someone challenge you. That was wonderful.<\/p>\n "It was a very subpar program however."<\/p>