Eight Books About Motherhood - Not Just For Mums

A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk

One review of Cusk’s memoir of motherhood notes that even though the beats of her book are predictable—pregnancy, birth, sleepless nights—it is as gripping as a thriller. An intellectual in the best way, Cusk finds solace in Edith Wharton and Samuel Coleridge when a colicky baby rocks her sense of self. If you’re looking for warm fuzzies about the experience of parenting an infant, you won’t find them here, but you will find a wonderfully sharp, observant, occasionally shocking account of a mother’s first few months.

Bossypants by Tina Fey
NYTimes Review

Fey’s memoir is thought of more as a book about work, but I found the bits about motherhood were funny and poignant and extremely meaningful. She writes about trying to decide whether to have a second child (for normal, non Tina Fey women, second children are often adorable career killers). She also writes about struggling to breastfeed in a way that is both hilarious and affirming--and involves the phrase “Williams-Sonoma Tit Juicer.”

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott
You can read...Almost the whole thing here

A lovely, funny, happy and very realistic record that seems timeless when read. A decade or so before the first mommy blogger started chronicling her baby’s life on the world wide web, Lamott set the gold standard for relatable, and deeply moving personal writing about first-time motherhood. She's even insightful enough to realise that having a man around might make it more difficult rather than less. Lamott was a single mom who was struggling to get by on a freelance writer’s income, but her memoir isn’t ever mopey. It’s heartfelt without being soppy, and spiritual without being over-earnest. It is a must-read for any pregnant woman.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner
Judith Warner's website

Love it or hate it...it's a classic. Some modern mums find it just too depressing... Just as Betty Friedan identified the Feminine Mystique in the 50s, Warner identifies the “mommy mystique” in the aughts: The notion that motherhood has become an endless source of work and guilt. Upper middle class American women drag their kids to an army of specialists at the first sign of any problem, they spend all their time chauffeuring their children to an array of enriching activities, and they treat birthday parties like an arms race, but with bounce houses. Certainly Warner’s book is chronicling first world problems, but she makes it clear that spending so much time hovering over our children isn’t good for mothers, for children, or for society. 

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
Read The Paris Review here. It's not just a book for mummies. 

Coked up pyrotechnic mother. Not Karr, her own mother that is. Mary Karr’s memoir of her dysfunctional childhood isn’t just an amazing portrait of her mercurial, artistic mother, it’s also one of the best memoirs of the past several decades. Karr is a beautiful writer, and she doesn’t describe her youth with an air of victimhood. She is a fighter, and she comes from a family of fighters. Even the most dramatic and harrowing bits of her story—in particular, when her mother sets the family’s possessions ablaze in a horrifying front yard bonfire—are told with compassion and wit.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior
All About Women Interview

At times, parenting can feel like simultaneously the best and worst things that ever happened to you. Senior draws on an impressive body of research to show why parenting in the United States can feel so onerous. It’s a combination of unrealistic expectations—parenthood isn’t all roses as our culture might have you believe—and a country that doesn’t support parents. There’s no maternity leave, no help with child care, and long work hours. Harried parents will feel soothed by Senior’s book because it proves that it’s perfectly normal to feel stressed and overwhelmed from time to time.

Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence by Rebecca Walker

Walker’s book is nothing if not provocative: She (understandably) ruffled feathers when the book came out over assertions that an adoptive mother can’t love a child like it's biological mother. But the daughter Alice Walker was bound to be controversial. Her book is journal-style, in the manner of Anne Lamott’s, and it provides an extremely personal look at how Walker’s idiosyncratic brand of feminism interacts with her new role as mom.