If Mother’s Day left a bitter taste in your mouth, cozy up with one of these five irreverent, alternative reads.
by Michele Moses
Over the summer, I went to the wedding of a close friend’s mother. For her toast, my friend opened with, “My mother is the first person I ever loved.” On the surface an unremarkable statement, the sentence took our collective breath away, because it was likely true for all of us. Whether icy or close, our relationships with our mothers are formative to the people we become, and they are as various as we are. Yet the sentiments of Mothers’ Day celebrations are uniform and traditional, leaving little room for the highly specific sources of very deep meaning that can be found in individual families. Along with Meghan Daum’s Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids these books reflect the many different responses that women have to motherhood, the ambivalence felt by individual women, and the fraught relationships that children have with their parents.
1. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Vintage International, 1988
The Fifth Child finds the horrors in domestic life, and the selfishness that drives childbearing, which makes it a perfect companion piece to Meghan Daum’s collection. When David and Harriet Lovatt greedily procreate too numerously, they are punished with a demonic son, and Harriet’s “maternal instinct” becomes her fatal flaw.
2. Room by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown and Company, 2010
Narrated by five-year old Jack, Room is the story of a woman kidnapped and held in a garden shed and the child she bears after being raped by her captor. Haunting and innovative, it takes on both a very specific crime and the more universal parental mission to create an illusion of safety for one’s children.
3. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich
W. W. Norton, 1976
Adrienne Rich’s revolutionary text is the first to claim parenting as an essential subject of feminist inquiry. Equal parts personal and political, it examines the ways that motherhood as an institution is shaped by the patriarchal system in which it exists.
4. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl
Faber & Faber, 2014
This collection explores the active struggle that exists between raising children and producing creative work. An award-winning playwright and a Macarthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Sarah Ruhl chronicles bringing up three children in “essays” that are sometimes as short as one word.
5. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
Bloomsbury, 2014
Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast recounts her experience caring for her parents in the final years of their lives in a poignant and hilarious graphic memoir. She turns a keen eye on their neuroses and outsize personalities, while also delving deep into the realities of grief.
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Michele Moses is a web producer at The New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter at @michelemoses10.
