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8 challenging books about motherhood

By Kobo • May 04, 2022Big Ideas in Books

Motherhood isn’t all Sunday brunches and handmade greeting cards.

No matter what the annual deluge of tear-jerking TV commercials would have us believe, everyone’s experience of motherhood and having a mother is different. Here are six challenging books that get just how difficult and complicated that relationship can be.

The Lost Daughter  by Elena Ferrante 

Recently adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson, The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante is the story of Leda, a middle-aged woman who goes on a solo vacation to the Ionian coast after her daughters have grown old enough to leave home. When Leda meets Nina, a young mother on the beach, old memories of her own difficult years of motherhood.

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Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur

When author Adrienne Brodeur became a mother, she looked back at her relationship with her own mother with fresh eyes. In her memoir Wild Game, Brodeur looks back at her childhood with her magnetic, complicated mother. Adrienne became her mother Malabar's confidant when her mother started an affair behind her father's back. At the time, Adrienne was thrilled to have the attention and to share her mother's secrets, but the deeper she became involved with her mother's infidelity, the more unsettled she became by their relationship.

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Motherhood by Sheila Heti

Sheil Heti's Motherhood deftly explores the honest and at times difficult question of whether or not to become a mother. Heti's narrator, having reached the age at which many women wonder when, meditates on if she will be a mother. Over time, through her partner, her body, friends, family, and fate, the narrator grapples with the question of motherhood and struggles to make a decision.

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Little Fires Everywhere  by Celeste Ng 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng explores different kinds of mothers living in Shaker Heights, a quiet suburb of Cleveland. Elena Richardson is the kind of mother who likes to assume she has complete control over her family and that she knows best for her children. But when single mother Mia Warren comes to town with her teenage daughter Pearl, the new residents of Shaker Heights turn the Richardsons' world upside down. And tensions only heighten when the two women find themselves on opposite ends of a fight for custody of a Chinese American baby.

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And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I was Ready by Meaghan O'Connell 

Motherhood doesn't always come when it's wanted, and it isn't always welcome. In Meaghan O'Connell's memoir And Now We Have Everything, the author explores her own transition into motherhood when she was still a young adult. When Meaghan became pregnant at a young age, she had no idea what she was in for. Meaghan looks at her journey through her unplanned pregnancy, from her changing body to the weird push to make "mom friends" to sex after pregnancy and much more. For Meaghan, motherhood wasn't a "natural" or "magical" experience, and in this book, she sets out to reset women's expectations for what motherhood can and should be.

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The Vanishing Half  by Brit Bennett 

Brit Bennett's novel The Vanishing Half is a book about sisterhood, but it's also a story of motherhood and all its complications. The Vignes twin sisters grew up together, but as teenagers they tried to run away from home. One came back, and the other ran off. Now, as adults, they live very separate and different lives. One sister lives in the small town where they grew up, and the other has completely left the family and passes for white. The two women are now raising daughters of their own. And when their daughters' lives intersect, both women will be forced to face the consequences of their decisions.

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The School for Good Mothers  by Jessamine Chan

As if motherhood wasn't hard enough, mothers are constantly faced with the judgment and opinions of others. Are they mothering the correct way? Are they raising their kids wrong? Jessamine Chan's speculative novel The School for Good Mothers imagines a future where this judgment is taken to the extreme. In this dystopian world, mothers put in government reform programs where the success or failure of their devotion to motherhood is tested. When Frida is put into this government program, she must prove that she's the perfect mother or risk losing her daughter Harriet forever.

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Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Detransition, Baby is the story of three women, transgender and cisgender, as they navigate and make meaning of womanhood, parenthood, gender, and relationships. When one woman becomes accidentally pregnant and in possession of what the other two desperately want, the question of an unconventional family between the three of them comes into play. Through these flawed and deeply human characters, Peters explores motherhood, gender, and family in thought-provoking new ways.

Listen to Torrey Peters discuss Detransition, Baby on our Kobo in Conversation Podcast Podcast.

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Photo by Kyle Johnson on Unsplash

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