The best books about flawed, fierce, and fascinating mothers

The Blue Jay’s Dance is Louise Erdrich’s first memoir—a chronicle of a year of mothering and writing. I gobbled up this book when I was pregnant with my own first child, wanting to know how a writer I so admired managed two utterly consuming tasks so successfully. Erdrich kept a cradle in her writing studio and would write while the baby slept in the same room—an idyllic scene that gave me hope during my own first pregnancy that my writing life might still continue post-baby (turns out it’s a tad more complicated than where you put the cradle). One wise sentence to give you a taste of the whole: “The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby’s needs gracefully retreat.” Yep. 

I read Beloved for the first time when I was 17, long before I knew the first thing about how parenthood transforms a person. Back then, I was awed by the power of Morrison’s language; rereading decades later, I am awed anew but also deeply moved by the fierce protective passion of Sethe, the book’s protagonist—a mother who would rather kill her own child than see her enslaved. Sethe’s choice scars her, of course—a psychic scar Morrison brilliantly dramatizes by having Sethe’s dead baby return to haunt Sethe in the body of a beautiful, hungry ghost—but it also aptly illustrates the depth of the depravity at the core of the slave system. An awe-inspiring, heart-breaking, and heart-mending read that should be required for every American citizen. 

I devoured Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (four novels that trace a lifetime friendship between two women living in a deeply patriarchal mid-twentieth-century Italy) in a single summer a few years back, and when I got to the end of those few thousand pages, I felt as though I wanted to start right over at the beginning again. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the third novel in the series, and I name it here because it’s the novel in which Elena—the book’s protagonist, and a writer herself—becomes a mother. Elena has a modern marriage compared to her friend Lina’s, but still, she finds the expectations and demands of motherhood difficult to reconcile with her own creative ambitions. Ferrante represents that central struggle with arresting honesty—a captivating read. 

Maggie Nelson just dazzles me. Her prose is so sharp and thoughtful, her thinking so idiosyncratically brilliant, her images filled with light. The Argonauts is both memoir and inquiry, a story of how Nelson and her partner Harry, who is in the midst of a gender transition, became parents, a story fraught with obstacles and veined with wisdom. Nelson’s voice mixes erudition, visceral power—especially when she writes about sex and the body—and formal innovation. The Argonauts caused a splash when it came out, and for good reason—its unflinchingly honest portrayal of one queer couple’s creation of family together is beautiful, brave, and yes, deeply fierce. 

Unputdownable from page one, The School for Good Mothers follows Frida, a recently divorced new mother, who, sleepless and stressed out, makes the mistake of leaving her baby alone in the house for two hours, and is subsequently stripped of her parental rights and forced to attend a dystopian re-education program where she must spend the year “learning to be good.” There she becomes part of a heartbroken society of women whose crimes range from serious physical abuse (burning a child’s arm with a cigarette) to arguably reasonable decisions like allowing their eight-year-old to walk home alone from the library. I was so taken with how Chan skewers the oppressive culture of perfection-parenting while depicting the gut-wrenching, soul-forging qualities of mother-love.