❥ 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
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.