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Hi! I'm Molly. I love history, arts, theatre, and, you guessed it, books! My goal is to share good books. Learn more about me here.

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MOTHERHOOD

SOCIAL SCIENCE

Forget “Having It All”: How America Messed Up Motherhood and How to Fix It by Amy Westervelt. Read an excerpt.

Published by Seal Press, 2018

In its love of all things youthful, the Enlightenment produced new ways of thinking about children, namely that they were innocents who ought to be protected and nurtured, rather than sinners who needed to have their spirits crushed. But while the Enlightenment might have improved the lot of children, it wasn’t so great for mothers.

Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick.

Published by Pantheon, 2020

Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by Lisa Marchiano. Read an excerpt.

Published by Sounds True, 2021

The fundamental aspects of the hero’s journey are revealed through the numerous myths and tales in which a hero must venture out into unknown territory, conquer dragons and other challenges, and return with new wisdom. The mother’s journey has likewise been elucidated in ancient and timeless tales. Her pattern shares much in common with that of the hero, but it differs in one vital way: hers is not a journey out but a journey down. Heroine stories usually involve a descent.

Don’t Forget to Scream: Unspoken Truths About Motherhood by Marianne Levy.

Published by Phoenix Books, 2022

Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose. Read an excerpt.

Published by Mariner Books, 2022

The idea that parenting had defined goals meant that motherhood began to be something at which you could succeed or fail.

Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture by Sara Petersen. Read an excerpt.

Published by Beacon Press, 2023

On Instagram, I shop not only for toddler forks and latte-colored BPA-free pacifiers, but also for a version of motherhood I want to embody – only, the act of buying things gets in the way of pursuing the happy, effortless maternity I crave. I often miss out on my own tender moments because I’m busy scrolling through someone else’s. And when I’m thinking clearly, I know that even the women sharing these moments aren’t always experiencing them either, since to share them necessarily means interacting with a phone, curating, staging, and playing with lighting and filters. But consuming those moments feels like an act of self-care, an escape, and a compulsion.

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS

Mothers Talking: Sharing the Secret by Frances Wells Burck. Read an excerpt.

Published by St. Martin's Press, 1986

I suddenly became very admiring of my mother, who had my two sisters and me each eighteen months apart. I called her up and I said, “Mom, how did you ever do it?” She said, “I went crazy.” I felt better the more I heard that everyone else went crazy. (From "Send Aaron Back to the Sky" by Sheila Fischer)

Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers Edited by Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender. Foreword by Dan Savage. Read an excerpt.

Published by Seal Press, 2001

We believe in true love – not in the marked romantic bullshit, but in love of children, partners, communities, friends. Sometimes the sexiest thing somebody can do is the laundry. [Introduction by Ariel Gore]

Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves Edited by Camille Peri & Kate Moses. Read an excerpt.

Published by Harper, 2005

You even read an article that has been sitting on the kitchen counter since before the baby was born. You read it backward, last sentence to first sentence, because you are certain you will be interrupted any second and you’d hate to miss the ending. This doesn’t seem odd to you. Your days flow backward. You wake wishing the day would end; you go to sleep wishing you could start the day over. (From "Boys! Give Me Boys!" by Jennifer Allen)

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood Edited by Kerry Clare. Read an excerpt.

Published by Goose Lane Editions, 2014

I hesitate still to use the term post-traumatic stress disorder; it seems a designation best reserved for those who have endured awful losses, witnessed horrible atrocities. I gave birth to a healthy baby in a well-equipped hospital in a developed country, loved ones by my side. What was the matter with me? From "Truth, Dare, Double Dare" by Heather Birrell)

Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now Edited by Ann Imig. Read an excerpt.

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015

What she said was that it would be complicated. Forever. We were entering into a gray area. Like our surrogacy agency had told us, we were pioneers. Sometimes pioneers got lost.

The Magic of Motherhood: The Good Stuff, The Hard Stuff, and Everything in Between by Ashlee Gadd and the Writers of Coffee + Crumbs. Read an excerpt.

Published by Zondervan, 2017

But to my daughters, I will beg, “Fall in love with yourself, first.” And I do not mean a tolerant, conditional, praise-yourself-when-you-look-good kind of love. I mean deeply rooted, white-hot, irrevocable, laugh-at-yourself love. This matters. [Seven Pounds of Redemption by N’tima Preusser]

Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces by Dawn Davies. Read an excerpt.

Published by Flatiron Books, 2018

You see, writing Web content and science copywriting had nothing to do with revealing myself, which is what I was afraid of. I was afraid of rejection. I was afraid of not being good enough at what I really wanted to do, so that each time the deadline rolled around, I choked. [Kicking the Snakes]

Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words by Kimberly Harrington. Read an excerpt.

Published by Harper Perennial, 2018

Your faces have meant more to me than any other faces because yours are the only faces on this earth I saw first. Even before that, I felt them inside me and honestly, how weird is that? [Essay: You are All the Joy]

#IMOMSOHARD by Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley. Read an excerpt.

Published by HarperOne, 2020

Just to go away for twenty-six hours, I had to hire an over-night babysitter, pack lunches, prepare two separate “just heat me up” dinners, hire a dog walker, leave car seats, write elaborate instructions for the bedtime routine, list doctors’ numbers, clean the house, and buy two new episodes of Micky Mouse Clubhouse and Henry Danger on iTunes.

Rage Against the Minivan: Learning to Parent Without Perfection by Kristen Howerton. Read an excerpt.

Published by Covergent Books, 2020

I was an amazing mother before I had kids. I had it all planned out. There were meadows involved. There would be handmade wooden toys and organic, home-cooked meals. There would be picnics on hippie-inspired blankets (in the meadows) and vintage books and lazy days at the park (more meadows). There would be crafts of some sort, and late-night family readings of classics by the fireplace.

The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood Edited by Katherine May. Read an excerpt.

Published by Elliott & Thompson, 2021

But now, a few short years later, you’d rather watch YouTube and you want to work in an office, which only goes to show how little control we get to wield over others’ meaning-making. I suspect it’s better and safer that way. How about I decide what this all means to me and you can decide for you.

I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood by Jessi Klein. Read an excerpt.

Published by Harper, 2022

I know this because here I am, alive, writing this, and here you are, alive, reading it, which means our mother did what heroes do: they kept us all alive to tell our own tales one day.

Mother Noise: A Memoir by Cindy House. Read an excerpt.

Published by Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner, 2022

The things that haunt us can be left behind in what we make, held safe where they won’t continue to torture us. Maybe that is what drives us to make art out of the worst things that happen to us. Maybe for some of us, that is how we survive.

NOVELS

I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson. Read an excerpt.

Published by Anchor, 2003

A year older than me, at thirty-six Candy is congenitally single and sometimes I envy her ability to do the most fantastic things like going to have a drink after work or visiting the bathroom at weekends unaccompanied by a curious five-year-old or coming in to work hollow-eyed after being up all night having sex instead of coming in to work hollow-eyed after being up all night with the wailing product of sex.

How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson. Read an excerpt.

Published by St. Martin's Press, 2018

Maybe I should get someone to design a digital me, who gets on with cooking dinner, ordering shower tiles and all the boring jobs no one notices I’m doing, while the real Kate can concentrate on the life I really want, with time on my nicely manicured hands, firming up the abdominals and the plunging pelvic floor, and much less need to swear.

Bad Moms: The Novel by Nora McInerny; Based on the Movie written by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore. Read an excerpt.

Published by Dey Street Books, 2020

Before Bernard was born, I had thought of motherhood as a club I’d join the moment I gave birth. My baby would be the equivalent of receiving a Mom card: I could present Bernard to any other mothers to instantly form the bonds of friendship. Instead, I found out that there were lots of different kinds of moms, and you could only befriend the moms who completely subscribed to the exact same list of beliefs and practices that you did.

FATHERHOOD

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS

Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood Edited by Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith. Read an excerpt.

Published by PM Press, 2011

I also remind myself that my responsibility first and foremost is to let him know I love him unconditionally. I don’t want my anger or my disappointment to pervade my other interactions with him. After being flat-out lied to like a fool, I still must make him dinner, sit and eat with him and my daughters in a respectful and supportive environment. This sounds obvious or simple, but it is probably the most difficult thing I have to do. To keep these things separate: my anger at one thing and my behavior to him in other areas.

Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad by Dan Zevin. Read an excerpt.

Published by Scribner, 2012

Lately all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not. My father is calm, cool, and collected. I am tense, clammy, and confused.

PARENTHOOD

SOCIAL SCIENCE

For Better, For Worse: A Candid Chronicle of Five Couples Adjusting to Parenthood by Susan Squire. Read an excerpt.

Published by Doubleday, 1993

“…Besides, I like telling someone, ‘The baby’s crying, I have to get off the phone.’ It’s a way of saying there are more important things in the world than all this professional bullshit.” “That’s because you’re a man. If you’re a woman and you say that, people think you’re not serious about your career or you’re not successful enough to hire a babysitter.”

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior. Read an excerpt.

Published by Ecco, 2014

Today, we are far less clear about what “parenting” entails. We know what it doesn’t entail: teaching kids mathematics and geography and literature (schools do that); providing them with medical treatment (pediatricians); sewing them dresses and trousers (factories abroad, whose wares are then distributed by Old Navy); growing them food (factory farms, whose goods are then distributed by supermarkets); giving them vocational training (two-year colleges, classes, videos). What parenting does involves, however, is much harder to define the sole area of agreement for almost all middle-class parents – whether they mark their children practice the violin for three hours a day or exert no pressure on them at all – is that whatever they are doing is for the child’s sake, and the child’s alone. Parents no longer raise children for the family’s sake or that of the broader world. As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren’t.

How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn. Read an excerpt.

Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2017

I tell Chapman that I find this advice frankly irritating. “Why should I have to praise my husband, like he’s a golden retriever, for things he should be doing in the first place?” He laughs and says he understands. He explains that he isn’t suggesting that women should pump up the male ego – rather, that the need to feel appreciated is universal.

Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives are Reshaping the American Dream by Julie M. Albright.Foreword by Thomas Dolby. Read an excerpt.

Published by Prometheus, 2019

Talking about the issues of nature deficit disorder and devices, writer Paul Boutin recounted an example that brought the issue into clear focus: Back in Maine when he was a kid in the 1960s, the worst punishment you could get was “you’re grounded,” meaning you couldn’t go outside and play. Now, for his nine- and eleven-year-old nephews growing up there, “going outside” isn’t a desire that can be withheld; for them, the worst punishment is “no PlayStation.”

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS

Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood Edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses of Salon.com. Foreword by Anne Lamott. Read an excerpt.

Published by Washington Square Press, 2000

It was enough for me to have a fulfilling marriage to Frank, their father, and hope that as we all got older, the kids would appreciate the benefit of having an extra adult handy who loved them no matter what. Even though as a child that’s all you seem surrounded by, once you’re grown up you realize that those people are a vanishing breed.

NOVELS

Mary and O'Neil: A Novel in Stories by Justin Cronin. Read an excerpt.

Published by The Dial Press, 2001

They were happy, it was true; they had reached a point of happiness in their lives, a place of rest after a journey of some difficulty, and they frequently marveled at this fact: how, of all people in the world, and all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together

The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell. Read an excerpt.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

She keeps only the sea in her sights. She had had a creeping fear of late that what she wants most – for her life to begin, to take on some meaning, to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious technicolour – may pass her by. That she might not recognize it if it comes her way, might fail to grasp for it.

They Might Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine. Read an excerpt.

Published by Sarah Crichton Books, 2016

There was something else, too, something no one seemed to realize: if Aaron went into a nursing home, he would be gone. “What about what you need” – Molly and Daniel asked her the same thing. But what she needed was so obvious. She needed Aaron.