The Experience of mothering or being mothered has shaped many a high-profile memoir: think A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk and Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, both meditations on motherhood, or Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel and Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou, each told from the child’s point of view. This season brings several titles that expand the genre; PW spoke with their authors and editors about the books’ common themes and unique perspectives.
Labor of love
“Motherhood can be a transformative experience; it reshapes one’s sense of self in profound ways,” says Thomas Gebremedhin, VP and executive editor at Doubleday. “Memoir offers not only a window into authors’ personal lives, but also a larger reflection on the emotional labor and complexities of nurturing others.”
Gebremedhin edited cultural critic Amanda Hess’s Second Life (Doubleday, May), a document of pregnancy and parenting in an era of algorithms. “The rapid advancement of technology coupled with the overwhelming presence of social media in our daily lives has led to concerns about how these platforms are altering self-perception and relationships and our sense of belonging,” Gebremedhin says. “Amanda homes in on that beautifully. True identity is not something imposed from the outside but something that can be reclaimed, reimagined, and embraced in spite of all these challenges.” PW’s starred review highlighted Hess’s central epiphany: “Overwhelmed by a plethora of ‘experts,’ from free birthers to ‘medical mom’ influencers who display their disabled children’s vulnerable bodies online, Hess gradually came to agree with child psychologist Alison Gopnik: no number of parenting ‘hacks’ can sculpt the perfect child nor substitute for a healthy society.’ ”
Mental health advocate and mother of four Danielle Sherman-Lazar mines her long battle with eating disorders in Mothers Are Made (Alcove, Apr.), asserting that resilient parents are forged in the crucible of crisis. At age 26, seizures associated with her chronic mental illness landed her in the hospital; she credits her mother for nursing her back to health. When Sherman-Lazar had her first child three years later and struggled with new motherhood, she drew on her “rock bottom” experiences to fortify her. “Every mother will face hard times, and you’re going to ask yourself, How am I going to do this?” she says. “If they receive a bad diagnosis, they’re going to get through it, and their kid will get through it, and they will both become better and stronger through that struggle. I want mothers to be empowered and not have to sit there alone in shame.”
Held Together by physician Rebecca N. Thompson (HarperOne, Apr.) collects stories from 21 of Thompson’s patients, friends, and medical colleagues about creating and sustaining their own families. Thompson had endured a string of life-threatening pregnancy losses and rare medical conditions on her path to motherhood and, even as a doctor, “it was overwhelming,” she says. “Once I started sharing my story and talking to others about all this, we knew that we wanted to preserve these conversations to help other people. We created this book as the resource we wish we’d had when we were struggling—full of stories that are real, encouraging, hopeful, honest, and beautiful in their complexity.”
The book explores adoption, fostering, abortion, step-parenthood, mental illness, and the death of a child, among other topics, and Thompson hopes it sparks curiosity about extraordinary moments in ordinary lives. “I want to inspire readers to believe that, no matter how difficult and complicated life may sometimes feel, we can endure anything, especially when we support each other.”
In I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader, June), Palestinian poet Hala Alyan braids her experience of motherhood via surrogacy with the legacy of her family’s displacement. “My daughter, biologically ours, was carried by someone else, birthed by somebody else,” she says. “I was feeling quite exiled from my body, displaced from the prescriptive experience of motherhood. I had to confront ideas around what it meant to mother, what it meant to carry, what it meant to caretake. What does it mean to earn these roles? What are we told societally about who gets to inhabit them and who doesn’t?”
These ruminations also serve as a metaphor for Alyan’s Palestinian identity. “It’s a book about what it means when places, experiences, and selfhood feel suddenly, abruptly, enormously unrecognizable and what happens when what has been familiar suddenly feels completely foreign us,” she says. “That’s a pretty universal experience.”
Mom’s the word
Other forthcoming memoirs focus on the complicated relationship between an adult child and their mother.
Erika J. Simpson makes a “bewitching debut,” per PW’s starred review, with This Is Your Mother (Scribner, May). She deploys dual timelines—present-day Chicago, as she agonizes over whether to visit her dying mother, and the past, through a biographical portrait of her mother’s life—to “capture the moment that you realize your parents are just people,” says Emily Polson, who acquired Simpson’s book for Scribner. “You have newfound empathy for the people who raised you. They did the best they could with what they had, and maybe it wasn’t enough, but you learned to live with the lessons they gave you, for better and worse.” Simpson’s narrative casts a wide net, Polson adds. “She draws from texts as varied as the Bible, the ’90s sci-fi show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?, Black church traditions, and the scandals that have plagued Buffy the Vampire Slayer. High and low culture and the sacred and the secular inform the way that this book is crafted.”
In September, Scribner is releasing Mother Mary Comes to Me, the first memoir from Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy. “She had a strong mother who may have been negligent, edging into abuse,” says Kathryn Belden, VP and editorial director at Scribner. Yet the book, Belden notes, is an exercise in compassion. Crafted in the aftermath of Roy’s mother’s death in 2022, it traces how the author’s life and career were shaped by Mary Roy—her single mother, a renowned women’s rights activist in India—with whom she had a difficult and sometimes contentious relationship. “One of the beautiful things about the book is, unlike perhaps the way some people handle family members, Arundhati is very fair to her mother, while also saying what her experiences growing up with that mother was like.”
Bon Appétit editor Jennifer Hope Choi explores the nomadic tendencies she and her mother share in The Wanderer’s Curse (Norton, May). After divorcing Choi’s father, her no-nonsense Korean mother left Southern California for Alaska, the first of several such moves. When Choi’s life imploded years later, she followed in her mother’s figurative footsteps and began her own season of wandering, to New York and Georgia and Oklahoma. The author interweaves “childhood anecdotes that characterize her mother as a hard-nosed, eccentric matriarch with bits of Korean folklore,” according to PW’s review, which called the memoir “funny and relatable.”
Choi hopes readers revel in the book’s absurdity and humor. “I want to convey some very idiosyncratic characters that are nothing like I’d read before, especially immigrant women who weren’t just stoic and wanting their children to be overachievers,” she says. “My mother is a character and I love that she’s resonated with readers because of how strange, complicated, funny, tough, complex, and confounding she is.”
How to Lose Your Mother (Viking, June) by Molly Jong-Fast strikes a more somber note, and speaks to anyone grappling with addiction, dysfunctional families, or the grief of losing a parent, says Andrea Schulz, VP and editor-in-chief at Viking. Jong-Fast, the only daughter of second-wave feminist icon Erica Jong, documents her mother’s encroaching dementia and reckons with her unusual childhood. “Molly’s at the fulcrum of a lot of people who are about to hit that same place of having to parent children and parent a parent,” Schulz says. “She’s so clear-eyed about what it takes and how hard it is and how guilty you can feel while you’re doing so much.”
Jong-Fast also acknowledges another universal truth, according to Schulz: “You’re never going to get the parent that you wanted. The book grapples with that; it’s honest and willing to go to the darkest places.”
This article has been updated with clarification from Held Together author Rebecca N. Thompson.
Pooja Makhijani is a writer and editor in New Jersey.
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