It's Complicated: A Mother's Day Booklist

Today we’re considering literature that spotlights complex and chaotic motherhood through themes of upheaval and diaspora, shame and the supernatural. Being a mother is intense (understatement) and these titles take it seriously, using it as a springboard for creating rich, challenging art.

So we don’t skim over books in which motherhood is the least complicating factor characters deal with: try Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), in which Esperanza’s artistic, kind mother is a protective presence in abrasive surroundings. Or Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974), in which receiving gender-affirming care empowers the author to tell her children who she already is, effectively grounding their relationship in a truer, deeper bond.

On the other hand, mother love encompasses hate, rage, enchantment, admiration, fascination and Oedipal obsession in Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987), a memoir of the most turbulent yet intuitive relationship of her life. In Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here (1986), chaos is also coming from inside the house. Adele August is mobilized by money (which she needs) and attention (which she wants), to her prim daughter Ann’s displeasure. Speaking of, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015) has tactics for those whose childhoods were spent parenting their parents.

Joy Williams and Doris Lessing give new motherhood five-alarm fire bad PR. If you’re pregnant, wait a year to check out their books from the Library. For everyone else: Williams’s The Changeling (1978) and Lessing’s Thatcher-era gothic The Fifth Child (1988) are absurdist, funhouse mirrors of normative domesticity; if your taste skews sicko, they’re also comedies. In The Changeling, perennially smashed Pearl is surrounded by more children than a sober person could keep track of. In The Fifth Child, Harriet, a conservative woman grows frightened of her brutal youngest son. Is it a satire of bourgeois conformity or proto-propaganda for superpredator theory? Read and decide for yourself. There’s no pretense of normalcy from the moment of conception; in both books, motherhood is a hostage situation by default.

Williams and Lessing convey mothers who are singularly isolationist. (What their characters really need are some friends to help them through!) Let’s review novels that tether the role to community and history. Still more catastrophe, this time historical: Reclusive genius Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) finds rot in the family tree. Rape and slavery violated Ursa’s maternal bloodline for generations and her early memories are of hearing their memories, which are American-branded nightmares. Memory is nonlinear and so is the timeline of this book, which diagrams cyclical violence to fearsome effect. You can see the novel’s influence on the writing of its editor, Toni Morrison, whose Beloved (1987) also filters mother-child relationships through the legacy of slavery’s holistic sadism.

If diasporic households are haunted by the importation of cultural baggage, mothers in these novels are cast as its mascot, or scapegoat, depending on your angle. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autofictional The Woman Warrior (1976), the author’s native Chinese mother is repulsed by her first generation American daughter’s bend away from tradition and mysticism toward modern Western culture. In Marie NDaiye’s Ladivine (2013), Clarisse—like Kingston, an assimilated child of immigrant parents—is as ashamed of her old-world mother as she is guilty of her own class and race panic. Mothers are an easier, smaller-scale target for their anger than coordinated colonialist power and war.

Generational trauma renews itself when its cause isn’t stemmed. With great compassion, Nora Raleigh Baskin’s children’s novel Ruby on the Outside (2015) illustrates how a lack of access to resources (or healthcare or housing) compromises our and our children’s rights to a dignified life. When a mother’s class circumstances lead to arrest and incarceration, the cycle of punishment extends to her daughter Ruby, whose primary caregiver is all but confiscated from her. Deena Misses Her Mom (2017) conveys this same weight and pain and was written by children who themselves have incarcerated parents, Jonae Haynesworth, Jesse Holmes, Layonnie Jones, and Kahliya Ruffin.

Proliferating nuclear family units is expensive and effortful. Sheila Heti’s blurry, indecisive Motherhood (2018) debates whether the institution is worth partaking in at all. Meanwhile, in Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2019), Sarah Schulman encourages finding community outside of the family structure, making a comprehensive case to gay and queer people for estranging themselves from abusive relatives and making roots elsewhere.

What are your favorite complicated books about motherhood or caregivers of any kind? Pass along recommendations below. Better yet, give them as gifts, along with a fine bouquet, to the mothers in your life or to loved ones who have mothered you across the spectrum of intimacy. Sharing blood isn’t a requisite—think caregivers, drag mothers and mentors. Whose lap do you want to rest your head in when you feel small? Bring them books and flowers, too.