From the Motherhood Canon

❥ Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution,
Adrienne Rich, 1976

❥ The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and
Human Malaise, Dorothy Dinnerstein, 1975

❥ The Mother Knot, Jane Lazarre, 1976

❥ Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year,
Anne Lamott, 1993

❥ A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, Rachel Cusk, 2001

❥ The Days of Abandonment: A Novel, Elena Ferrante, 2002

❥ An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A
Memoir, Elizabeth McCracken, 2008

❥ Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor
Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, Ayelet
Waldman, 2009

❥ After Birth: A Novel, Elisa Albert, 2015

❥ The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson, 2015

❥ Little Labors, Rivka Galchen, 2016

❥ The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood,
Belle Boggs, 2016

❥ What We Lose: A Novel, Zinzi Clemons, 2017

❥ Body Full of Stars: Female Rage And My Passage Into
Motherhood, Molly Caro May, 2017

❥ And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I
Was Ready, Meaghan O’Connell, 2018

❥ Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression, Jessica
Friedman, 2018

❥ Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose,
2018

❥ Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and
Culture of Pregnancy, Angela Garbes, 2018

Writing Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety

The articles in this special section:

When You Don’t Want to Be a Mother

by Chanel Dubofsky

Motherhood profoundly echoes what it’s really like to forego propriety, which women do when we challenge the idea that having children will offer us absolute satisfaction.