Books like Motherhood — picked by fans

Unlike Ivey’s other book The Snow Child, which grapples with the grief of infertility (a book I also love!), this book considers the opportunities a life without children allows for.

It opens with Lieutenant Colonel Allan Forrester as he prepares to lead an expedition into Alaska in 1885. His wife, Sophie, is an explorer in her own right and plans to accompany him—until they realize she’s pregnant and decide she has to stay behind.

Spoiler: Sophie miscarries and learns she will likely never be able to carry a baby to term. But this isn’t an endpoint for Sophie: instead, it sets her on a path toward professional and creative success, as well as love and happiness in her marriage.

We’re used to reading about how motherhood gives life meaning—I loved Ivey’s portrait of how not having kids can do the same.

This book sticks the reader in the middle of a maternity ward in poverty and flu-stricken Dublin circa 1918. I was totally rooting for nurse Julia Powers, an experienced maternity nurse who works long, thankless shifts trying to keep women and their babies alive.

The lack of medicine, staffing, and money is appalling as women enter the hospital to give birth. Yet through empathy, determinism, and quick thinking, Julia, her trainee, and her patients find ways to help each other. It’s a tour de force in female friendship, intelligence, and problem-solving and an indictment of the medical incompetency of male physicians.

It illuminates a cross-section of Dublin citizens struggling with poverty, the Great Flu, and the aftermath of a horrendous war. I found the story moving, gripping, and somehow hopeful.

This book is a tour-de-force—a beautifully written story about Marian Graves, an Amelia Earhart-type adventurer during the prohibition era, and Hadley Baxter, the actress set to play her in a movie more than half a century later.

I really enjoyed how the two stories are in conversation with each other; both women determined to chart their own courses in very different eras and what they learn about themselves in the process. I was also struck by the intense obligation the actress feels to get this character right and the personal toll it takes as she discovers how similar their emotional lives may have been.

This book provided a true escape just when I needed it most, and I could have kept reading long after I turned the final page.

I loved Writers & Lovers because it captures something that isn’t talked about enough: the strange, in-between years of adulthood when you’re supposed to have things figured out but very much do not.

Casey is grieving, broke, juggling complicated romantic relationships, and trying to finish writing a book while the rest of the world seems to be moving forward. 

What resonated most with me is how honestly Lily King writes about ambition and uncertainty. Casey isn’t lost because she lacks intelligence or drive—she’s lost because life is complicated, money is stressful, and love rarely arrives in a neat, predictable form.

This 1965 novel by English author Margaret Drabble follows protagonist and PhD student Rosamund as she becomes a single mother.

Educated, upper-middle-class Rosamund narrates with a quintessentially British and—for me—highly enjoyable blend of primness and humor. Fascinatingly and somewhat frustratingly, Rosamund keeps her pregnancy a secret from her daughter Octavia’s father, even after Octavia is born. She’s like a strange English Virgin Mary who studies Elizabethan sonnets and really doesn’t want to “put anyone out”.

Her story also offers an interesting glimpse into class issues in 1960s London and the way that experiences of pregnancy and motherhood can both transcend and accentuate class divisions.

Kristen is a friend of mine, and I felt a strong sense of kinship to her work not only because I admire her personally but also because it deals with so many of my novel’s own themes—grief, family, unplanned pregnancy.

Motherest’s main character, Agnes, is a college student who describes her life on campus, her pregnancy, and the loss of her beloved brother through a combination of traditional narration and a series of letters written with increasing urgency to her absent mom. Agnes’s voice and letters are both hilarious and heartbreaking. Every once in a while, you meet a character who you miss when their story ends—for me, Agnes is one of them.

I loved this novel for its savage intelligence and frank exploration of the problems of inhabiting a body while trying to live a “life of the mind.”

Protagonist Dorothy is an adjunct English professor whose ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage are not so much the subject of this book as a metaphor for Dorothy’s life in general: her hopes have not materialized, and her nonstop thoughts rarely lead to action. Readers who have struggled to claw their way up the academic ladder (particularly those who’ve spent a lot of time at the bottom of that ladder) will especially enjoy this book.

Be prepared for visceral descriptions of Dorothy’s body—of all that it produces, and all that it fails to produce.

This blunt and surprising short novel is translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein and narrated by Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, professor of comparative literature, and self-identified “unnatural mother” who becomes infatuated with a younger mother she meets at the beach while vacationing alone. It’s an engrossing yet uncomfortable read; Leda’s descriptions of her maternal ambivalence are unnervingly yet refreshingly candid and often dark.

Readers who are prone to categorizing characters as “likable” or “unlikeable” will probably put Leda in the latter category, but one of the things I love most about Ferrante’s work is the way she explodes those categories, not focusing on the rightness or wrongness of her characters but rather honoring their complexity with brutal honesty.

I normally gravitate toward fiction, so this one came out of left field for me.

Abigail Tucker, a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, dives deep into the science of what makes a mother. I think I enjoyed this book so much because it almost reads like fiction between its accessible (and surprisingly funny!) tone and the stranger-than-fiction revelations about what happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes a mom.

I listened to this audiobook about motherhood while pushing my newborn second child in a stroller. Sarah Knott takes the reader through the stages of becoming a mother–conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, newborn care, childcare, and resuming work–and then doing it again with a second child.

Throughout, Knott contrasts her own experiences with those of women in the past, especially in North America and Britain. The differences are striking, not just in healthcare but also in social support. I thought about the women I'd written about who had many children and how important familial support was.

As a fellow professor, I was heartened to read about Knott's experience returning to work and re-finding her academic mind. She writes poignantly about how motherhood is a constant interruption. It is so true!