The best books about women without kids (that aren’t sad)

Great Circle tells the life story of Marian Graves, a fictional woman aviator who went missing in 1950 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe via the North and South Poles.

I’m married to a pilot, so I recognized Marian’s love of flight and her willingness to take risks and make sacrifices to excel in aviation. But the real reason I loved the book is that forgoing motherhood—having children in the 1930s and 1940s would keep a woman out of the cockpit for good—isn’t framed as a sacrifice for Marion.

The life she wants to live simply doesn’t include children. Marion’s certainty about what she wants from life was as thrilling for me as the aerobatic stunts she learns to do in her airplane.  

Once, when I was in graduate school studying to become a historian, I met a woman my age who was a midwife.

I was hit with a surprising wave of regret, like I’d found the profession I was meant for but too late, after I’d already chosen another path. Both parts of me, historian and wannabe midwife loved this book, which is set in the maternity ward of a London hospital during World War II.

Nurses are in short supply, so the protagonist is quickly promoted from washing the bedding to delivering babies—which, it turns out, she’s very good at. Yet being surrounded by women becoming mothers doesn’t make her want children of her own.

“Some are meant to create life,” she muses, “and some are meant to help them bring it into the world.” The part of me that still thinks I should have been a midwife suspects I would feel that way too.

Unlike Ivey’s other book The Snow Child, which grapples with the grief of infertility (a book I also love!), this book considers the opportunities a life without children allows for.

It opens with Lieutenant Colonel Allan Forrester as he prepares to lead an expedition into Alaska in 1885. His wife, Sophie, is an explorer in her own right and plans to accompany him—until they realize she’s pregnant and decide she has to stay behind.

Spoiler: Sophie miscarries and learns she will likely never be able to carry a baby to term. But this isn’t an endpoint for Sophie: instead, it sets her on a path toward professional and creative success, as well as love and happiness in her marriage.

We’re used to reading about how motherhood gives life meaning—I loved Ivey’s portrait of how not having kids can do the same.

At first, the protagonist, Casey Peabody, might seem uncomfortably familiar to a lot of us: a 30-something struggling to make it in a tough field (she’s a writer) while being close to broke and dating all the wrong people.

One of those people, a divorced dad named Oscar, offers her a ready-made life she could slot right into: a beautiful home, an enviable wine cellar, a healthy bank account, and two kids who could use a mother figure.

Watching Casey realize that life isn’t what she wants after all—and then trying to figure out what she does want, and how to get it—felt like cheering for a friend as she came into her own. The ending is almost improbably happy, which just made me love this book all the more.

My list wouldn’t be complete without Heti’s Motherhood, which features an unnamed narrator who is approaching her 40th birthday and weighing the question of whether or not to have children.

The narrator carefully considers what she might lose and gain with either choice, weighing the unknown joys and challenges of motherhood against the more familiar joy and grief of her life as it is. The narrator’s agonizing might not be for everyone, but for me it felt equal parts electrifying and uncanny, like finding the contents of my own brain on the page.

Toward the end of the book, a young girl asks the narrator why she never had children. “I had never dreamed of being a mother,” the narrator answers. “I wanted to be free.” That makes sense, the girl says, nodding. It makes sense to me, too.