Here are 100 books that The New Don't Blame Mother fans have personally recommended if you like
The New Don't Blame Mother.
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My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.
"The Silent Female Scream" teaches "how to believe that as a woman you have the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay." Through case studies and discussion, the author exposes that women's sense of self-worth and entitlement to speak their needs, especially in relationships, is an area that feminism has ignored to its peril. By looking at the legacy of emotional silence that many women have inherited from long before grandmother's day, she warns that emotional silence damages the mother-daughter relationship, women's relationships with themselves and each other, and their…
I'm a stage and television actress who, after getting married and having two children, turned to writing in my forties as my “second act”. I started writing about being a mom in Hollywood, and being raised by a mom who was—well, nuts. For years I dined out on crazy stories of my childhood: breakfasting on cold, half-eaten hors d'oeuvres strewn across our Park Avenue room from my crazy mom's all-night cocktail parties, falling asleep on banquets at nightclubs, skipping school to sneak into a swanky hotel in London and meet the Osmonds. The final result was my memoir, Chanel Bonfire. I believe it has the power to inspire and give hope, as well as entertain.
I’m a big believer in self-help books. This was recommended to me by a therapist who basically saved my life, navigating me through a very difficult time in my life in my twenties. The author, Victoria Secunda, breaks down all the different dysfunctional types of mothers, with chapters titled “The Avenger”, “The Doormat”, “The Critic”, in an easy-to-understand way. Reading this book helped me “diagnose” my mother, who never took responsibility for her mental illness, always blaming her behavior on her kids or others. This book helped me to understand her more fully, perhaps even feel compassion for her. I often recommend it to anyone who, like me, has or had a troubled relationship with their mother.
“A book of great value for every daughter and every mother; useful for sons, too.”—Benjamin Spock, M.D.
From the Introduction: The goal of this book is to help readers achieve that separation so that they can either find a way to be friends with their mothers, or at least recognize and accept that their mothers did the best they could—even if it wasn't “good enough”—and to stop blaming them. Among the issues to be covered:
• To understand how a daughter's attachment to her mother—more so than her relationship with her father—colors all her other relationships, and to analyze why…
My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
Losing your mother is devastating especially when a daughter is young. I’ve found that Hope Edelman’s book is a go-to book for daughters who have lost their mother and for daughters whose mother may be alive but unable to emotionally connect. Loss comes in many forms and this book helps daughters on their healing journey.
Ask any woman whose mother has died, and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as deeply changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life. Although a mother's mortality is inevitable, no book had discussed the profound, lasting, and far-reaching effects of this loss- until Motherless Daughters , which became an instant classic. Twenty years later, it is still the book that women of all ages look to for comfort and understanding when their mothers die, and the book that they continue to press into each other's hands.Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss…
My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
I like this book because it is well-researched and reveals the politics of mothering. As Vanessa Olorenshaw notes, “mothers’ rights are the flotsam left behind on the ocean surface of patriarchy.” This is a must-read book for all mothers and daughters because the women’s movement has yet to prioritize the rights of mothers to not be the world’s caregivers.
If it is true that there have been waves of feminism, then mothers’ rights are the flotsam left behind on the ocean surface of patriarchy. For all the talk of women’s liberation, when it is predicated on liberation from motherhood, it is no liberation at all. Under twenty-first century capitalism, the bonds of motherhood are being replaced with binds to the market within wage slavery and ruthless individualism. Mothers are in bondage – and not in a 50 Shades way.
Olorenshaw is clear: When mothering is on our terms, it can be liberating. The time has come for a radical,…
As a practicing clinical psychologist, teacher of psychotherapy theory and technique, and author (Barbarians at the PTA, Madmen on the Couch, Money Talks) who writes about the psychopathology of daily life for various online and print publications, I am a participant in/observer of mom culture. I love a juicy mother-child story.
This is mom culture at its best: Wolitzer traces the members of a clique who drop their kids at pre-k and enjoy over the ensuing years the gravitational pull of parenting, school volunteering, and part-time work.
She explores familiar dilemmas about aging, career versus family, and female friendship, while offering a sometimes heartbreaking, but always realistic, look at the choices moms face as they watch their kids grow.
The New York Times bestselling novel by the author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion that woke up critics, book clubs, and women everywhere.
For a group of four New York friends the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood, but it wasn’t always that way. Growing up, they had been told that their generation would be different. And for a while this was true. They went to good colleges and began high-powered careers. But after marriage and babies, for a variety of reasons, they decided to stay home, temporarily, to raise their children. Now, ten…
I’m the author of two novels, a memoir, and numerous essays and humor pieces. As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to strong, flawed, funny female characters and voices. The pull is even stronger now that I’m at midlife, a phase that’s equal parts misery, hilarity, and night sweats. I read a wide range of books, from literary fiction and classics to psychological thrillers to graphic novels that I steal from my teenagers when they’re not looking. But I have a special place in my heart for books that explore the many facets of what it means to be a woman “of a certain age” today, while making me laugh—and sometimes cringe—with recognition.
I love it when stories are told through the lens of contemporary issues but still manage to be deeply personal and funny. Impersonationfits the bill, taking place against the backdrop of #MeToo and the Trump presidency, and starring sharp-witted forty-year-old single mom Allie Lang, who you root for right from the start. Allie is hired ghostwrite the memoir of a high-powered feminist with political ambitions, to make her seem more maternal and relatable. It’s a nearly impossible task—until Allie starts bringing herself to the page.
"By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards." --Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers TOGETHER, THEY MAKE THE PERFECT FEMINIST MOTHER
Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Years of navigating her own and America's cultural definition of motherhood have left her a lapsed idealist. Lana Breban is a high-profile lawyer, economist, and advocate for women's rights with designs on elected office. She also has a son. Lana and her staff have decided she…
Being an out lesbian isn't my sole identity. I'm a writer of five award-winning novels, an improv artist, and co-founder of an improv school—and I’m even more than that. I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, make myself a cup of tea, like to cook, like to walk, and adore reading—especially fiction. And while I am madly in love with my partner of 30 years (wife of 5) it's just one aspect of my life. My point being, LGBTQ2+ people do more than “be gay”. I like books that reflect this. I love a writer who crafts beautiful sentences, constructs imaginative stories, and provides me with endings I didn’t see coming.
All Adults Here is a summer read—when you just want something light. It’s a family drama, which I always enjoy, and always seem to write about myself. Plus, its protagonist, Astrid Strick, who, at sixty-eight, comes out to her family as bisexual, makes me really happy. I mean, older people have sexual needs too! There’s also a lovely transgendered character, her son. Really, the book is about inclusivity, and that’s a theme that always sings for me. And Emma Straub is just a beautiful writer.
THE IRRISISTABLE, UPLIFTING AND BIG-HEARTED STORY OF SURVIVING IN A MODERN FAMILY . . .
'A wonderful read' Elizabeth Strout 'Literary sunshine' New York Times 'A gorgeous and witty storyteller' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls 'The world will love it' Ann Patchett
The instant New York Times BESTSELLER ________
After Astrid Strick - a widowed, 68-year-old mother of three living in upstate New York - witnesses an accident, she resolves to live more honestly. Starting with the mistakes she made in raising her family.
But are her kids, tangled in their own messy adult lives, really ready to…
I thought being a new mom would be easy. Ha! I was shocked at how hard it was. My little baby—who mostly cried and came with no instructions—was a mystery. Determined to figure him out, I interviewed any mom who would talk to me—family members, girlfriends, moms at the YMCA, moms at parks, strangers on planes—any mom who would give me insight. They offered advice on burping, rocking, and sleep schedules and then morphed into advice on my relationship and warnings to hold on to my own dreams. The honesty and humor helped so much that I wrote a book on the subject to help other moms.
Finally, the truth about motherhood in an easy-to-read, entertaining style. I picked this gem up before I went down to the shore and my girlfriend and I read it to each other in front of our spouses on the beach. My favorite part of the book is the honest, hilarious quotes from the women who were interviewed. Their insights were thought-provoking! (Especially the gal who stated quite clearly what is not foreplay!)
Scratch the surface of the Super Mom and you may find someone who isn't even sure she can get through the day, let alone "do it all." Or at least that's what Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile felt. Curious, they began asking other mothers and found that after twenty minutes of touting the joys of motherhood, moms would inevitably admit that they were stressed out, exhausted, and depressed that their child's first word was "Shrek." After conducting over 100 interviews, Trisha and Amy discovered trends too similar and too widespread to be ignored. Whether the mom was in the office…
When I was pregnant for the first time, I knew exactly the sort of mother I was going to be. I had read all the articles, bookmarked all the tastefully filtered Instagram posts. But then I had my son, and I realized almost immediately how little I knew. It turns out that while those tender Instagram moments do happen (and they truly are magic), there are just as many moments that can only be described as: WTF? My novel, The Perfect Ones, goes deep behind the screens of two Instagram influencers and their messy, conflicting, and fundamentally human feelings on motherhood. Here are five more books about the parts that don’t make the Instagram grid.
I normally gravitate toward fiction, so this one came out of left field for me.
Abigail Tucker, a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, dives deep into the science of what makes a mother. I think I enjoyed this book so much because it almost reads like fiction between its accessible (and surprisingly funny!) tone and the stranger-than-fiction revelations about what happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes a mom.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lion in the Living Room comes a fascinating and provocative exploration of the biology of motherhood that "is witty, reassuring, and takes motherhood out of the footnotes and places it front and center-where it belongs" (Louann Brizendine, MD, New York Times bestselling author).
Everyone knows how babies are made, but scientists are only just beginning to understand the making of a mother. Mom Genes reveals the hard science behind our tenderest maternal impulses, tackling questions such as why mothers are destined to mimic their own moms (or not), how maternal aggression…
A professor of television, I had my first child at 28 and was the first of my friends to give birth. The mothering support I received came from my mother, who (bless her heart) was convinced that all women should stay home with their children and devote their lives to mothering. A lifelong feminist, I knew that something was amiss (particularly for a single parent), and as I learned more about feminism and mothering, I realized there was something at odds with the way mothers were treated in the media and society. Learning why became my passion.
I loved this book when I initially read it, and return to it time and again. Adrienne Rich is, quite simply, the mother of motherhood studies.
This book strongly resonates with me and my experiences as a mother, particularly how Rich defines mothering and motherhood as two distinct states of being: Motherhood–the patriarchal institution (this is where we get all the do’s and don’ts of what society expects of us as mothers)–and mothering–the actual affective labor of bringing up children.
One section in particular–where Rich compares the freedom of the summer break with the return to restrictions of term time and the ‘rule of the father’–is as true now as it was then. This is a personal take on motherhood infused with passion and intelligence. I highly recommend it.
In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience-as a woman, a poet, a feminist and a mother-she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A "powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection" (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionised how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer…
