Literature: 5 Best Books About Motherhood

Here is a compilation of 5 recommended books on motherhood for mothers and pregnant women who love to read.

1. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother – by Rachel Cusk

This book is as gripping as a thriller. If you’re looking for warm fuzzies about the experience of parenting an infant, you won’t find them here, but you will find a wonderfully sharp, observant, occasionally shocking account of a mother’s first few months.

2. Bossypants by Tina Fey

Fey’s memoir is thought of more as a book about work, but the bits about motherhood were funny and poignant and extremely meaningful. She writes about trying to decide whether to have a second child. She also writes about struggling to breastfeed in a way that is both hilarious and affirming.

3. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott

A decade or so before the first mommy blogger started chronicling her baby’s life on the world internet, Lamott set the gold standard for funny, relatable, and deeply moving personal writing about first-time motherhood. Lamott was a single mom who was struggling to get by on a freelance writer’s income, but her memoir isn’t ever mopey. It’s heartfelt and spiritual. It is a must-read for any pregnant woman, because it will prepare you for your infant without scaring you.

4. Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner

Warner’s book is chronicling first world problems, but she makes it clear that spending so much time hovering over our children isn’t good for mothers, for children, or for society.

5. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr

Mary Karr’s memoir of her dysfunctional childhood isn’t just an amazing portrait of her mercurial, artistic mother, it’s also one of the best memoirs of the past several decades. Karr is a beautiful writer, and she doesn’t describe her youth with an air of victimhood. She is a fighter, and she comes from a family of fighters. Even the most dramatic and harrowing parts of her story—in particular, when her mother sets the family’s possessions ablaze in front of their house—are told with compassion and wit.