Some people spend a lifetime trying to unravel their relationship with their mother. That bond, after all, is fundamentally asymmetrical: Moms can watch their children become who they are, but children will never see their parents’ formative years firsthand. Who was she before I came into the picture? many of us wonder. What makes her tick?
These questions are hard enough to answer when mother and child are close and mutually fond; for those pairs with complicated histories, explanations can feel even more elusive. The results of every maternal audit will differ, because moms are people, and people are distinct. Still, many of us can’t help but try, over years or decades, to understand the women who ushered us into the world.
The seven books below are about different kinds of parents, fictional and real; many, but not all, are told through the points of view of their children. These stories offer a starting point—and perhaps some insights—for those seeking perspective on their mothers. Reading them might spark contemplation about the choices our forebears have made, the losses they’ve endured, or the people they were before, and after, we showed up.
Blue Light Hours, by Bruna Dantas Lobato
When the unnamed narrator of Lobato’s semi-autobiographical debut leaves her home in Brazil to attend a liberal-arts college in Vermont, Skype becomes a lifeline for her and the lonely mother she left behind. On their near-daily video calls, the protagonist obliges her mom’s eager requests for “the news,” even while insisting “there isn’t much to tell.” “Soothe this old heart,” her mother says, a demand as much as a supplication. Mothers are frequently our first and best listeners—but they also have their own needs and longings, this novel shows. Though the book’s first section unfurls from the daughter’s perspective, the second focuses on the mother: her worries for her child, her declining health, and her struggle to define herself outside of the role of caregiver. Over the course of the novel, their relationship—now mediated by screens—shifts, as each woman takes turns mothering the other through their shared senses of sadness and isolation. Blue Light Hours concludes with the two women’s bittersweet reunion after five years apart. The separation has inevitably changed them—yet with it comes the possibility of discovering each other anew.
Mothers Before, edited by Edan Lepucki
Coming across an old picture of your mom—seeing her in her youth, maybe the age you are now, perhaps even bearing some resemblance to you—can provoke strange, striking feelings. A few years ago, Lepucki tried to get to the bottom of that sensation. She invited her female followers on social media to send her photos of their mothers before they became moms and cataloged the submissions on the Instagram account @mothersbefore, which now hosts hundreds of pictures of young women across many years and continents, along with wistful captions from their daughters paying tribute to the people they became. The account later spawned this book, which features more than 60 photos and essays from contributors such as Brit Bennett, Jennifer Egan, and Jia Tolentino. For these daughters—and, inevitably, for their readers—the images call to mind the forces that constrained their mothers’ lives, the sacrifices made on their children’s behalf, and time’s swift, inexorable passage. But the pictures also honor the individual personalities often obscured by the maternal role. Becoming a mom can cleave a life into before and after; Lepucki finds that “looking closely at an old photo of your own mother and asking yourself who she was then, and who she is now, asks you to blur that line a little.”
Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou
The seventh and final installment of Angelou’s series of autobiographies, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969, commemorates her relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, who abandoned Angelou and her older brother as young children and reentered their lives a decade later. (Neither of her parents, Angelou writes coolly at the start of the book, “wanted the responsibility of taking care of two toddlers.”) When they reunite, Baxter attempts to compensate for her absence with displays of loyalty: “If you need me, I will come,” she tells her daughter at one point. She fights for Angelou, but she is also an erratic and intensely independent person who doesn’t care to be pigeonholed as a parent; she throws herself into many jobs (shipfitter, nurse, real-estate broker, barber) and many lovers. Writing with the hindsight of decades, Angelou is more generous to Baxter than she was in her more youthful treatments, including Caged Bird. Here, she tries to accept her mother for who she was, acknowledging her shortcomings while feeling gratitude for the admirable qualities she instilled. “You were a terrible mother of small children,” Angelou concedes, “but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.”
Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett
In Patchett’s novel, set in the spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic sends 57-year-old Lara Nelson and her husband, Joe’s, three 20-something daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, back to the Michigan cherry farm they call home. There, the family hunkers down, their days occupied with the grueling task of picking cherries in the absence of their usual workers. To pass the time, Lara—who long ago abandoned her acting career—regales her daughters with the story of her 1980s romance with a now-famous film star. Her recollections teach the girls about a version of their mother they hardly knew existed: a 24-year-old thespian—about the age they are now—whose life was all art and pleasure; a woman who was single-minded about her craft, while squeezing in time between summer-stock-theater rehearsals for trysts and dips in a nearby lake. Her daughters, seeing new dimensions in Lara, initially can’t understand why she left acting behind to settle down with a farmer. But Lara has no regrets, and assures them that she is exactly where she wants to be. Although the glow of that summer has faded, she finds in the sum of all her choices a deeper, more durable joy.
Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo
Among the bustling cast of characters in Evaristo’s kaleidoscopic novel about the lives of a large group of Black British women are several indelible mother-daughter pairs who try—and often fail—to make sense of one another across generational, ideological, and economic divides. The sprawling Girl, Woman, Other plays out across decades, dropping readers into the worlds of women on both sides of the parental equation. Among them are Amma, the lesbian playwright whose fiery, combative daughter, Yazz, is “the miracle she never thought she wanted”; Bummi, a Nigerian immigrant whose daughter, Carole, becomes illegible to her when she goes off to a “famous university for rich people”; and Winsome, who came from Barbados to ensure a better life for her now well-off daughter, Shirley, who in turn is “never satisfied with what she has.” Even when these children and parents wound one another, Evaristo takes no sides, instead extending empathy and offering insights into what compels their sometimes maddening, sometimes relatable decisions.
The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken
McCracken once promised never to make her deeply private mother, Natalie, a character in one of her books—especially not in a memoir, a genre the elder McCracken despised. But when Natalie died, in 2018, the writer reconsidered that vow. The Hero of This Book, a novel that playfully skirts the boundary between fact and fiction, sees the bereaved McCracken wrestling with the ethics of writing about the ones she loves. In the process, she tries to parse Natalie’s many contradictions. McCracken, or her avatar, spends the novel wandering around London, a favorite city of Natalie’s, shortly after her death, recalling as much as she can about her: her small stature and larger-than-life personality, her bookish brilliance and financial incompetence, her stubbornness and self-mythologizing. (Natalie claimed to have invented both the mojito and children’s Tylenol.) From this swirl of memories emerges a moving portrait of an imperfect person who, McCracken writes, “loved being alive and in the world.” Her vivid rendering proves to be not a betrayal but the ultimate tribute.
Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt
Boyt’s novel is one of the sharpest, most poignant portraits of motherhood in recent memory. Loved and Missed is narrated by Ruth, a middle-aged schoolteacher in London who is estranged from her drug-addicted daughter, Eleanor. When Eleanor gives birth to a baby named Lily and—in Ruth’s eyes—proves unfit to care for her, Ruth decides to raise the girl alone. It’s a second shot at parenting for the new grandmother, who blames herself for Eleanor’s addiction. Over some 15 years, Ruth and Lily form an intimate, unshakable bond, anchored by their domestic routines and mutual affection. “I breathed my love onto Lily,” Ruth says. “What we felt for each other had a lot of heat and urgency.” Boyt elides the quotidian miseries of child-rearing, instead extolling its quiet, tactile pleasures. At the same time, the novel acknowledges that to become a mother is to take a profound risk, and offers an unvarnished look into Ruth’s mind—her regrets, desires, and fierce love—as she decides to leap one more time.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
