100 books like Mother's Milk

This book became a lifeline for me when I was going through an unhappily difficult and extremely stressful time. I felt as if it was written for me as a form of salve for my lack of trust in myself and my life at this point.

Rilke is wise, knowing, and reassuring about the vicissitudes of our emotional journeys. He encouraged me to hold onto myself in an emotional sense. To seek my own inner counsel and to not panic when my life seemed to unravel. I love his discourse on faith, solitude, trust, and his dissection of what it is to be an artist.

I found this a profoundly important and moving book when I was wavering about the bigger picture of life.

This book took my breath away.

This is no pithy or glib advice column book bound by word counts and editorial edits. Her advice is lengthy and considered and beautifully interwoven with her poignant personal stories. Her advice is raw and poetic. Not flowery or pretty poetry, but punch you in your soul, pierce directly into your heart truth bombs.

It’s tough love to the extreme. Every single entry took my breath away with its unflinching rawness. And, at the same time, delivered with compassion and care that I felt somehow … loved. There’s humor in this book, but it’s subtle, and it captures the wonder and madness and beauty and crazy courageousness needed to live in our bizarre world. 

This book is a fearsomely clever collection of essays on love, marriage, and adultery, all written through the lens of trying to better understand the complexity of the human heart. Touching and tender, these explorations of relationships are wincingly honest and clearly written straight from the writer’s heartfelt experience

There is a purity of emotional intelligence to the book, which I find reassuring. Reading about the writers' relationship f*ck-ups, which they stumble into as if falling into potholes, made me feel okay about my own stumbling efforts to navigate my emotional life.

I love this book because it made me laugh, it made me cry, and it cracked my heart wide open. Although I am not a drug addict and have not struggled with addiction in the traditional sense, I found this book completely relatable in terms of emotional pain and trying to surmount psychological patterns.

Rowland Hill’s account of his childhood is hilarious and yet it is an affectionate portrayal of his family and their failings. There is the sense of not being understood by his father, which I experience. This is an intelligent, brilliant book about healing, spiritual awakening, truth, and bleak pain. In other words, it is an original book about life.

Of this set of books, the first two are my faves. Who needs horror when it’s right here in St. Aubyn’s horrific childhood with his creepy father?

It becomes perfectly understandable why the young Edward dove into a life of utter self-destruction. When he becomes a drug addict, his sheer self-obliteration reaches epic proportions. I have to admit, I was awed. It’s not so much the stories of his sick father and oblivious mother or his gleeful romp through degradation that compelled me to keep reading. It’s the writing. These are the best descriptions of drug use that I’ve ever come across.

The writing reminded me of my favorite movie, Trainspotting, which managed to visually convey the effects of heroin addiction in a similar way. 

David Thomson can outmatch any film critic I know for sheer pungent accuracy, as well as passion. He knows every director, every actor, every movie, and he always has something valuable—and often something essential—to say about each one. Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its sixth edition, is a continuous delight, a perfect book for browsing. A required purchase for every film buff.

This is another book I came to via teaching; looking for new ecofictions, I put out a call on twitter and this title kept being mentioned by people I trust. When I read it, I was blown away by Hunter’s slim, powerful novel.

With the South of England underwater, Britons are forced to flee north to displacement camps, suddenly finding themselves fighting in supermarkets for supplies and walking the roads with their children.

I first read it for its depiction of eco-catastrophe and refugee crisis and its fascinating echoes of the fuel and food shortages of the pandemic. But as I reread it each year, I more insistently see it as a book depicting new motherhood as a crashing, overwhelming flood from which one emerges perhaps a year later, a haunted, dazed survivor.

This was the first ‘grown-up’ book I ever read. I was seven. I can still remember the green Penguin Books cover and the smell of old paper that accompanied it. I immediately became captivated by Sherlock Holmes and this mystery on the lonely moors. I still get goosebumps when I read that line, “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of an enormous hound!” Yikes! 

I love Holmes’s brilliance and his friendship with ‘my friend and colleague, Dr Watson.’ I love his wry sense of humor, his untidy habits, and his Victorian manners. I’m a grandmother now, and I still love Holmes and this book as much as I did when I was a child. 

Who wants to live forever? Or, as in this contemporary novel, for 500 years or more? In his unique style and wit, Matt Haig explores the many pitfalls and heartaches that living an extra-long life poses along with some of the positives his central character Tom must endure. Yes, it is a time-travel story, if at times a little too long and with much inward-self psychology, but one that brings elements of history, real-life characters, and at times shocking revelations by creating a scenario reversing a real human genetic condition, making the reader think: what if? We’ve all thought at times how wonderful it would be to live forever. After reading this novel, I know what my answer will be.

This book tackles big topics. Indigo Phillips is grappling with the fallout of her twin sister’s (Violet) terminal illness and Violet’s decision to die on her own terms by medically assisted death. When Indigo hears a voice in her head, urging her to go to the Arizona desert to find a rock formation that will save Violet, Indigo takes the proposition to her sister. And Violet agrees—but only if the entire family comes along. The Voice in My Head gives readers emotional space to explore the complexities of grief, the bigger questions of whether there is something beyond our existence, the chains and wings of family, and the love and hurts that can pull us apart but also have the power to bind us together.