An Auntie’s Summer Reading List about Motherhood: Nonfiction Edition
Nonfiction books that have taught me how to show up for moms.
Some Quick Announcements about Money
Up until now, I haven’t done any affiliate links at The Auntie Bulletin. As far as I can recall, I’ve never recommended any item for purchase other than books, and I always link to Bookshop.org. I don’t know whether anyone ever buys a book thanks to an Auntie Bulletin link, but I’ve been thinking that if anyone does, we might as well take the opportunity to raise a little money to support vulnerable kids and families.
So beginning with last week’s post and this one, I’ve started using affiliate links. This means that, whenever you buy a book from Bookshop using a link I shared, we’ll earn 10% of the retail price. And then 100% of those earnings will go to a different worthy organization each quarter.
Now through the end of September 2025, the recipient organization is Treehouse Foundation. This is a pretty cool org, Aunties. They have these intergenerational cohousing communities that include a lot of foster families and youth aging out of foster care, plus lots of elders. It’s a beautiful model and I hope it will spread.
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Now Let’s Get To It
Last week and this week, I am recommending several truly excellent books that have shaped my understanding, as an Auntie, of what parenthood is like. Last week I recommended fiction, and now it’s time for nonfiction.
There’s no paywall on today’s post. Please chime in in the comments with your own nonfiction parenthood reading recommendations!
I think it’s important for Aunties to have as good an understanding as we can of what parenthood, and specifically motherhood, is like. If we are to really show up for our loved ones who are parents, we need to get where they’re coming from, what preoccupies their time and attention, what questions they may wrestle with. Reading about parenthood is one of the absolutely best ways to gain this kind of understanding. All of the books on today’s list center motherhood: mothers themselves are the authors, and the books are about moms’ own experiences, not filtered through others’ perceptions.
This post is also for moms, and for parents of all genders. If you wind up reading any of the books recommended in this post, I hope they help you feel more seen and understood.
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, try your local library or independent bookstore, or get them at Bookshop.org and 10% of your payment will go to Treehouse Foundation. ❤️🌳🥰
The Recommendations
Angela Garbes (2018), Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. This book is so good. I vividly remember the experience of reading it cover to cover in the space of one sunny afternoon.
It was 2019 and I was pregnant for the first time. A dear friend of mine was also pregnant (with her second child), and I was so excited that we would get to have our babies together. This friend said she had something for me, and swung by my house and gave me this book. I’d heard a lot about it and been meaning to read it, and once my friend had gone I flipped it open and sat down on my nasturtium-filled second-floor balcony, and then I couldn’t put it down and I spent the whole rest of the day there, excitedly/nervously reading about pregnancy and childbirth and what’s it’s like to have a baby.
I lost that pregnancy (as well as the three that followed), but I still think of Like a Mother with nothing but appreciation and joy. Garbes is such an approachable, funny writer – the kind of person you want to be friends with. And what she has to say about pregnancy, childbirth, and having a new baby is fascinating. On the one hand, the process by which the human body grows and delivers a child is actually very poorly understood (because misogyny). On the other hand, what is known is really amazing. Garbes’ chapter on the placenta will blow your mind. An early version of her chapter on breastmilk went viral. And regardless of how well pregnancy and childbirth are or aren’t understood by scientists and the medical profession, women and birthing people have always shared an embodied knowledge about these processes with one another – indeed, this knowledge is as old as humanity itself. And Garbes unpacks all of it – both the science and the culture of pregnancy – with real warmth and wisdom.
It’s easy for Aunties without children to feel left out of the sisterhood of pregnancy and childbirth. This is partly because we are left out – especially those of us who have experienced infertility. Yet we can choose to learn how bodies make and nourish babies because this is every human’s inheritance, our literal birthright. We can choose to try to understand what our loved ones’ experience of having a baby might be like; and the more we understand, the more we can contribute and participate.
Listen to Terry Gross enthusiastically interview Angela Garbes about Like a Mother.
Rachel Cusk (2001), A Life’s Work and Rivka Galchen (2016), Little Labors. These books are both so good, and they hang together in my mind because I read them back to back – an approach I recommend. Both are essay collections by meticulously skilled writers, documenting what it’s like to have a baby and wrestling with what it means to become a mother.
Here’s what the internet has reminded me: Cusk’s book was perceived as quite negative by a lot of readers and reviewers. People got mad at her because, alongside documenting the occasional wonder or delight, she also acknowledged, at length, what is hard about childbirth and caring for a baby, and she admitted to feelings of ambivalence. Basically, she gave early motherhood mixed reviews. Speaking as an experienced Auntie, I can attest that many, many parents experience ambivalence when they first have a child, and this ambivalence only sometimes goes away. Most of these people are still really good parents.
Galchen’s book is more cheerful. She believed her baby would be uninteresting and so would motherhood, and then she was pleasantly surprised. Her essays are fragmentary – some only a sentence long, some interrupted midway by a baby’s cry – and as such they do a lovely job capturing the constantly interrupted nature of life with a newborn.
To my mind, it doesn’t matter much if we get a rosy story of early motherhood or not. These books function as a set in my mind because both are curious and real. Both look so very closely at the moment-to-moment experience of motherhood, the physical and emotional and interpersonal experiences alike, and it’s all just really… interesting. What greater transformation could a human undergo?
Read The Guardian’s soberly appreciative review of A Life’s Work.
Read The Guardian’s enthusiastic review of Little Labors.
Jessica Slice (2025), Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. This book is so good. It’s about parenting with disability, and it’s written with a strongly asset-based lens. Disability, for Slice, is actually a resource in navigating the experience of becoming a parent and making one’s way through the world as children’s primary caregiver. Disabled parents already know how to be responsible for unpredictable and needy human bodies, and they already know how to call on help to support themselves and their families.
One of the awesome things about this book is that it’s really, patently for everyone – disabled or not, parent or not. Being a disabled parent surfaces the dysfunction of our capitalist, ableist society, but in fact capitalism and ableism make life harder for everyone. “Disabled people are the canaries in the coal mine,” Slice writes. “We have seen the problem, and we have found answers.”
Each chapter in this book ends with wisdom for the non-disabled, from the vantage of disability. Over and over, the author offers gentle antidotes to that individualist hustle culture that makes all of our lives worse. Instead of going it alone, she suggests, we can marshall interdependent networks of care to make life better for all parents, kids, families, and communities.
I got to talk to Jessica about her book via Substack Live this week, and I’ll be sharing our conversation (both the video and the transcript) in The Auntie Bulletin next Friday. Look for it in your inbox!
Read The Massachusetts Review’s enthusiastic review of Unfit Parent.
Elissa Strauss (2025), When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. This book is so good, thoroughly complicating our society’s oversimplified and politically polarized narratives about care. Strauss addresses both the common view (from the left) that motherhood is an oppressive institution that exploits women, and the equally common view (from the right) that motherhood is a woman’s only truly fulfilling purpose in life. Neither view really respects carework.
And yet caring for others – children and adults alike – is absolutely essential and worthy of our highest respect. As Strauss puts it, “There is no humanity without care.”
One argument in this book that has really pushed my thinking concerns the relationship between carework and ambition. Ambition, Strauss observes, has typically been associated with the economics, politics, and work done outside the home. But what if we redefined ambition to include care? What if we were ambitious in our commitment to care? I think many, many parents already are – especially moms – although the language of ambition per se is rarely applied to the work caretakers do. And I think as Aunties and alloparents of all kinds, we can also be ambitious about the quantity and quality of care we provide. We can make it a goal to care for others, frequently and well. We may even be able to prioritize ambitious care over getting ahead in our careers – although maybe this is easy for me to say, since being ambitious about carework kind of is my career. Regardless, I’ve been mulling Strauss’s ideas about ambition a lot and I think they’re really worthy of our consideration.
Read The Nation’s enthusiastic review of When You Care.
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 books 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 just recommend titles and authors, or if you’d like to give a little more explanation, you could do a very quick summary of what it’s about, then tell us what you took away from reading it.
Also, what books are you looking forward to reading? Next up on my parenting reading list is Meagan Francis’s The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read, about how parents can deal when their kids grow up and move out into the world. It’s a great title and Meagan is a great writer (I know from her Substack newsletter), and I’m pretty confident this is going to be a good one.
Alright, you’re up. I cannot wait for your recommendations!
Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin
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I loved We Live for the We by Dani McClain about the power of Black parenting specifically and parenting as a political act, it really got me thinking. On my TBR: The Bluejay's Dance by Louise Erdrich, A Life's Work and Linea Nigra but also all the new-to me titles mentioned here thank you for this series!
The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood by Sharon Hays is a book I think about all the time. It's an academic book about the changing culture of parenthood that happened in the US during the 1980s to 1990s, but it's fairly assessible. This is where the term intensive motherhood came from which, online, has turned into another term to shame parents but that's not what the book is. Hays talks about the history of parenthood and the different ways cultures sees kids and how our current ideas reflect contradictory norms that expect moms to work while also shaming them for it.