The best memoirs by mothers writing shamelessly about motherhood

I read Operating Instructions during my own first son’s first year and so appreciated how deliciously and memorably shameless and taboo-smashing it was in describing everything from how Lamott’s friends kept reminding her about the “tiny poo” she left on the table during labor to the Radio KFKD constantly playing in her head to the appearance of an uncircumcised penis (if I recall correctly, something like a squirrel trapped in a garden hose?). Her fierceness, hilarity, and compassion helped me through one of the craziest times of my life.

What mother remembering her own labor wouldn’t be grateful to Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s essay, “What My Mother Never Told Me, or How I Was Blindsided by Childbirth and Survived,” for her shameless revelations about the most terrifying and grubby aspects of a safe, normal vaginal delivery. It’s just one of the brilliant and necessary essays in a book that kept me company through the hardest and funniest parts of being a mom.

Beginning in 1970, with “Up the Sandbox,” Roiphe was part of the first wave of shameless motherly truth-tellers. There are few more truer sentences than her acknowledgment that “feminism, despite its vast accomplishments, has not cured me of motherhood” in this poignant and prescient book about the impossible expectations that continue to bedevil working mothers.

Hrdy, a genius, is a renowned anthropologist and lyrical, powerful writer who, in this scholarly (150 pages of notes!) but compulsively readable book, tells us a lot of things we’ve never really wanted to acknowledge about motherly ambivalence throughout the animal world and certainly including humans. She is particularly wry and revealing about the biochemistry of motherhood, and how pregnancy, labor, and delivery all alter a mother’s brain.

This book, forthcoming from She Writes Press in 2023, is by a first-time author and mother of three who has for years counseled college applicants in Palo Alto, California, ground zero for educational anxiety. Smith combines beautiful writing, a wry comic sensibility, and indomitable courage in this all-too-timely timely book, which I was lucky to read pre-publication. She weaves together descriptions of the outlandish lengths to which some families will go to get their kids into the Ivies with scenes from her own backstage struggles to keep her children out of psychiatric hospitals. I’ve admired Smith’s incisive, delightfully shameless essays for years and couldn’t wait for her to publish this memoir, which deserves the widest possible readership.