An Auntie’s Reading List about Motherhood: Fiction Edition
The novels that taught me how to show up for moms.
Can We Change it to INTERdependence Day?
I’ve had enough of independence, Aunties. The cruel, inhumane bill that passed in the United States yesterday wants us all to be independent – in the sense of having nothing and no one to depend on – and that doesn’t work for me. Today and every day, I’m celebrating interdependence by showing love as best I can to the people around me, and receiving their love and courage and wisdom in return.
Garrett Bucks calls this “loving harder than the fascists can hate.” I don’t feel equipped to put my feelings about this bill into words, so I’ll just refer you to what Garrett has to say about it. He’s spot on as usual.
I try to nourish community interdependence in my everyday life – for instance, by inviting every friend I ran into at the farmer’s market to an impromptu potluck at my house next week – and also by writing this newsletter. Indeed, my hope is that The Auntie Bulletin will contribute to the emergence of an Auntie movement in coming years. Everyone will be talking about how to build more kinlike relationships with the people in their lives and communities. Public intellectuals will be talking about Auntiehood and caring for other people’s people on major podcasts and in national publications, and there will be more and more writers and creators on the Auntie beat. Most importantly, more and more people will be exploring Auntiehood, interdependence, and expansive ways to enact kinship in their everyday lives.
Your paid membership helps build the Auntie movement and a more interdependent society – not only because it helps me make a living writing about Auntiehood, but also because it raises this newsletter’s status on Substack, so then the algorithm shows it to more people, and then more and more Aunties find a place to converge and develop language for talking about our experiences, and the Auntie movement gains momentum. May it be so.
Thank you for reading, Aunties, and for all you’re doing to build a world where everyone is welcome and loved.
Now Let’s Get To It
There’s a newsletter I like a lot called The New Fatherhood, by Kevin Maguire. If you happen to know a father or two – especially a father who cares a lot about showing up lovingly and vulnerably and well for his kids, and especially if he has a partner who is a woman – then you may want to make said father aware of this publication. And you’ll probably want to subscribe, too, if only because there’s a recurring feature called “Good Dadvice” that’s a roundup of super hilarious parenting tweets. (Hover over the image below for alt-text).
A while back, Maguire did a nice post encouraging dads to read motherhood memoirs. “The motherhood memoir is an oasis of truth,” he wrote, “used to quench our understanding of what it’s like to be a parent.”
I agree. I’ve learned so much about parenting generally, and motherhood specifically, from reading about these experiences – in my case, memoirs for sure, but also other forms of nonfiction, and especially novels. The books I’ve read about motherhood have definitely, undoubtedly, I am absolutely certain made me a better Auntie because they have taught me so much about what parenting must be like. When my parent friends are too busy running after their children to narrate their experience to me, reading about parenthood has supplied sustained opportunities to imagine my way into their shoes. And that helps me show up for them in a deeper, better way.
This week and next, I am recommending several truly excellent books that have shaped my understanding, as an Auntie, of what parenthood is like. This week I’ll recommend fiction, and next week nonfiction. I’m focusing on motherhood stories simply because no fatherhood stories or gender-neutral parenting stories leapt to my mind that met my other selection criteria – no big surprise, given who tends to write about parenting.
There’s no paywall on today’s post. I hope you’ll chime in in the comments with your own parenthood fiction recommendations!
This post is for the Aunties, but it’s also for the moms. Those of us who aren’t mothers ourselves often legit don’t get it, and that kind of sucks. For an experience that’s so widespread, motherhood is also widely misunderstood, taken for granted, and co-opted for crappy purposes. If you check out any of the books recommended in this post, I hope they help you feel more seen and understood.
Selection Criteria
All of the books on this list center motherhood: mothers are the main characters, and the stories are about their own experiences, not filtered through others’ perceptions of them. The mother figure(s) in these stories may be adoptive, foster, or non-traditional in some other sense, but they are their children’s primary caretakers. These books provide a sustained look into the ongoing experience of mothering.
I am a bigtime, very avid reader of genre fiction. This includes lots of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, crime, spy novels, historical fiction, and Westerns. Most of the novels I’ll recommend today are genre fiction (i.e., they’re not only motherhood stories but also ripping yarns – happy summer!), but what I’m not going to recommend are books focused on trauma. These books aren’t about family separation, and they’re not about parents or kids in sustained mortal peril.
Did I re-read these books for the purpose of this post? No. Do I have a good memory? Not really. So what you’re going to get here are my impressions and how these books made me feel and some takeaways about motherhood – often several years after reading. I feel justified in not doing my homework for this one because the whole point is that these books made an impression. They shaped who I am as an Auntie and they continue to contribute to how I show up for the parents I love.
If you’d like to check out any of these books, may I recommend your local library or independent bookstore? Alternatively, you can get them at Bookshop.org.
The Recommendations
Pamela Erens (2016), Eleven Hours. This book is so good. It’s a short, somewhat harrowing account of a single mother going through labor and childbirth and her relationship with her nurse – just an up close, immediate, the moment-to-moment story about giving birth.
The main character, Lore, arrives at the hospital on her own, and no one arrives to support her during her birth. A lot of the story is about her experience in the hospital, and some of it is also her reflecting on how she came to this moment and what she wants for herself and her child – inflected, naturally, by the emotional and physical intensity of actually being in labor. Although none of Lore’s loved ones are present, she does have a kind, lovely nurse named Franckline, an immigrant from Haiti who’s also pregnant and is dealing with her own stuff, much of which she has to work through in the process of supporting Lore. The whole novel, start to finish, takes place over eleven hours.
The story is harrowing simply because childbirth itself is (often? usually? almost always?) harrowing. My body still remembers what the adrenaline of this reading experience was like: my heart was racing, Aunties. To be clear, reading about childbirth is no proxy for actually experiencing it, and this novel doesn’t pretend to teach us. It’s super dramatic because giving birth is super dramatic. Childbirth is scary. It’s painful. It’s miraculous. These are good things for Aunties to understand in as embodied a way as we can.
Read NPR’s enthusiastic review of Eleven Hours.
Carola Dibbell (2015), The Only Ones. This book is so good. It’s a future dystopian novel that’s all about the experience of being a mother. It taught me a lot about what moms worry about and what they hope for for their children.
I didn’t know what I was getting into when I read this novel. Thanks to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, I was in a big phase of reading post-apocalyptic fiction and I just wanted another story where people were figuring out how to survive and cobble together a life. I’m still a sucker for this genre. What I didn’t know before I read this book is that it’s really, first and foremost, a motherhood story.
In a post-pandemic future where society has largely collapsed and communicative illnesses run rampant (I know, right?), Inez is one of the few people alive who is seemingly immune to everything. This makes her valuable as a medical test subject (and it’s how she scrapes a living); it also means her genetic material is highly-prized. Through a series of dystopian events, she winds up in hiding, raising her own clone from infancy. Against the backdrop of a barely functioning society, Inez teaches herself to care for a baby, wrangles a toddler, fights to find her kid a decent school, deals with teenage rebellion – and throughout, reassures herself: “Still alive.” The moms I know can relate.
Read NPR’s enthusiastic review of The Only Ones.
Molly Gloss (2000), Wild Life. This book is so good, and actually it’s my view that Molly Gloss is one of the most criminally under-recognized novelists alive. I came across her work because I was reading through everything Ursula K. LeGuin ever recommended – an exercise I can’t recommend highly enough for any other bookworm Aunties – and Gloss’s work emerged as one of my absolute favorite standouts. She has some books about horses that are gorgeous and wonderful, whether you’re a horse person or not. (I’m not). She has a book about Quakers in space, which I loved. And she’s got Wild Life, which is a book about a missing child and the mother who goes in search of her (who is not the missing child’s mother, because other people’s people!), and Sasquatch.
Look, I know it sounds weird. Just trust me on this one, okay?
Charlotte Bridger Drummond is the widowed mother of five spirited boys, a feminist and author of dimestore women’s adventure stories. They live on a homestead in rural Oregon. One day, a child is lost from a nearby logging camp and Charlotte and her housekeeper, the child’s grandmother, set out to help with the search. I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that some unexpected characters in this story turn out to be wonderful mothers.
Mothers are central to this book, as are their hopes and fears for their children. Charlotte’s own direct experiences of parenting occur mostly at the beginning and end – there are a lot of spirited kid hijinks and humor when she’s at home, and these are some of the most delightful scenes in the novel – but she also reflects on how to balance the labor of parenting with her creative life, and with her sometime-ambivalence about where she’s ended up. Then the search for a missing child raises the specter of the safety of her own kids, and of everyone’s kids. Indeed, from an Auntie perspective, one of my favorite aspects of this novel is its emergent focus on loving other people’s children.
Read Reactor’s enthusiastic review of Wild Life.
Becky Chambers (2017), A Closed and Common Orbit. This book is so good – and like everything by this author, a cult favorite. It’s a science fiction novel about people (loosely defined) finding family and belonging. While it’s billed as a sequel, it totally works as a standalone.
This story alternates between two narratives whose relationship emerges only later in the book. One of the narratives is about a sentient ship’s AI who has illegally escaped into an android body and is forced to live in hiding, building new friendships and found family along the way. That part is very nice and found family is a theme in Chambers’s work, so it’s already checking the Auntie boxes. The motherhood story, though, is in the other narrative.
Jane 23 is a cloned, enslaved child who escapes the factory facility where she grew up and ventures into a dangerous, world-spanning junkyard. In the knick of time, she finds refuge in a busted shuttle with secure walls, a functioning door and, most importantly, a fully-functional and highly maternal AI named Owl. While there’s more peril and family separation in this novel than the others on this list, Owl’s intervention is what keeps Jane (mostly, somewhat) safe in a truly hostile world. This story also doesn’t stick as closely to the mother’s perspective as my other picks today, but Chambers’ warmhearted writing makes it easy to imagine ourselves into the mother character’s experience.
I’ve read most of Chambers’s novels, and I liked all of them, but the mother/child story in this one makes it my favorite by a wide margin.
Read The Guardian’s enthusiastic review of A Closed and Common Orbit.
Honorable Mention
Ruthanna Emrys’ 2022 novella A Half-Built Garden doesn’t delve too deeply into the experience of motherhood per se, but it does depict a lovely utopian vision of motherhood as a prerequisite for leadership. In this first-contact story, a mother who’s a linguist by trade and short on childcare options has to bring her baby to the planet’s first encounter with intelligent alien life. It turns out that having a baby on your hip is the alien race’s prerequisite for entering into diplomatic negotiations, as bringing a child signals you’re serious about avoiding violence and finding common ground. The second half of the story is basically a matriarchal interspecies summit/house party. Highly recommended.
I list Peter Brown’s 2016 young adult novel The Wild Robot as an honorable mention simply because I haven’t actually read it yet, but I did watch the movie on a recent flight. It’s so good! Roz is a sort of butler/service robot shipwrecked on a remote island. She’s a really bad fit for this environment at first, but she starts to build relationships with the local animals after inadvertently adopting an abandoned gosling, Brightbill. The movie is beautifully animated, emotionally powerful, and genuinely funny – a wise, heartful depiction of a mom figuring out how to raise a child.
Your Turn!
Today’s post isn’t paywalled because I suspect y’all have a lot of other awesome reading recommendations for us and I want you to be able to share them in the comments. Aunties, what stories have taught you the most about the experience of parenting? Parents, what stories have made you feel the most understood, or helped you to better understand your own and other parents’ experience?
Feel free to think and recommend expansively here, Aunties: I stuck to novels, but you can also recommend short stories, graphic novels, comics, movies, plays, or any other fiction texts that come to mind. And save your nonfiction recs for next week, because we’ll have another thread then!
Criteria reminders:
Center parents: Recommend stories that depict the experiences of parents themselves, not overly filtered through others’ (such as their children’s or partners’) perspective.
Avoid family separation and trauma: These stories are definitely important, especially the closer they are to things that happen in the real world, but they don’t tell us much, really, about the day-to-day experience of parenting.
You don’t have to remember the actual story very well in order to recommend it: How did it make you feel? What did you take away?
Feel free to just recommend titles and authors, or if you’d like to give a little more explanation, you could do a very quick summary of the kind of book it is (“future dystopian novel about the experience of being a mother”) and the premise of the plot, then tell us what you took away from reading it.
I cannot wait for your recommendations!
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Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which was about mothering daughters who were on the edge of being independent.
Beartown by Fredrik Backman, which was very much a story about family and watching parenting decisions impacting the lives of the kids.
The house in the cerulean sea is a fantasy about parenthood rather than motherhood and it is such a lovely book (the sequel is good too) and as an Auntie it taught me a lot about truly treating kids as individuals and what it means to support and empower them!