Motherhood Memoir

This is Emily Bloom’s journey towards and through motherhood, a path that has become, for the average woman, laden with data and medical technology. Emily faces decisions regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, technologies that offer the illusion of certainty but carry the weight of hard decisions. Her desire to know more thrusts her back into the history of science, as she traces the discoveries that impacted the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood.

Kate Braestrup's life was transformed by the loss of her husband; now Kate faces the possibility that she may lose her son. As a young mother, Kate Braestrup discovered the fierce protectiveness that accompanies parenthood. In the intervening years -- through mourning her husband and the joy of...

Award-winning journalist and host of Black Enterprise Business Report Caroline Clarke’s moving memoir of her surprise discovery of her birth mother - Cookie Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole - and the relationship that blossomed between them through the heartfelt messages they exchanged on hundreds of postcards. A heartfelt, inspiring tribute to both Caroline’s adoptive parents and her biological mother, Postcards from Cookie illuminates the enduring power of love to shape and guide our lives.

In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.

Ann Campanella, a freelance writer and horsewoman, returns to North Carolina after a several year absence. In her midthirties and ready to start a family, she is used to setting goals and accomplishing them. But when Ann experiences a series of miscarriages at the same time her mother shows signs of Alzheimer's, she plunges into an emotional journey that leads her to a deeper understanding of herself and what it means to love.

Fugitives from a man as alluring as he is violent, Andrea Jarrell and her mother develop a powerful, unusual bond. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she's put that chapter of her life behind her - until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees that it's her mother's choices she's been trying to escape all along. Without preaching or prescribing, I'm the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.

Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, Alyse Myers always yearned for more in life as she watched her mother settle for an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying job, and a joyless existence. Alyse rejected everything about her mother's life, but after her death, she inherited a small wooden box whose contents revealed a deeply moving truth.

As it turns out, it's entirely possible for the people we've lost to come back to us when we need them the most. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice navigates it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood, and allow herself to be a daughter once more, in order to take care of her own girls.

Impossible Motherhood is a heartrending and ultimately triumphant testimonial told by a writer looking back on her history of addiction. Abortion has never offered any honest person easy answers. Vilar's dark journey through self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and historical hauntings is a powerful story of loss and mourning that bravely delves into selfhood, national identity, reproductive freedom, family responsibility, and finally motherhood itself - today, Vilar is the mother of two beautiful children.

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties.

A bicultural child of a Malay mother and an Indian father, Amelia Zachry was different from the get-go, never quite fitting in. In this raw, inspiring memoir, she chronicles the long, winding journey that brought her from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Kentucky, USA the place she and her family now call home.

“All my blessings are the blessings of community.” —Octavia Spencer “Give them their flowers while you can” is something Octavia Spencer’s mother often told her, and now, it’s how she lives. In this captivating memoir, the Oscar-winning actor and producer recounts the seeds of the...

Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens - obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity - one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life's biggest chaos: motherhood.

An explosive and hilarious memoir about the exceptional and life-changing decision to conceive a child on one's own via assisted reproduction When British journalist, memoirist, and New York-transplant Emma Brockes decides to become pregnant, she quickly realizes that, being single...

After her six-year-old daughter puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams decides to abandon a career as an academic and become a police officer. It's not lost on her that she may have applied to the Police Academy to escape the realities of mothering twins born via IVF at twenty-nine weeks. As the twins grow and test her endlessly, she feels she is failing. She needs a win. During a grueling application process, Megan measures herself against the other candidates and confronts the normative notions of what it is to be a good mother.

From the outside, Seana Smith lived an enviable life. An Oxford graduate, a successful career with the BBC and Sydney’s Channel 9, a bestselling author, happily married. But behind this perfect life she had a secret: Seana was a drinker, and alcohol was slowly taking away her life, destroying...

Having a baby is supposed to be one of the most magical things that can happen to a person. Or so they say. Meagan Gordon Scheuerman was nearly a year into motherhood before she realized she had postpartum depression. Instead of thinking she was sick, she thought her vision of motherhood was a sham and a lie. She wasn’t entirely wrong. She was also in more trouble than she knew.

Updated with new exercises to deepen your spiritual journey, this powerful debut from one of the world's most respected shamanic teachers leads you through healing rites and initiations along the Andean Medicine Wheel This book follows the Shamanic journey specifically through the rites of...

This story is an inspiring and personal testimony of how a woman fell in love with architecture and created a life for herself but then decided to give everything up for love and follow the American Dream. Little did she know, a pandemic, a baby, and a new business would all happen at once! Follow Gloria’s incredible journey to becoming a worldwide renowned architect and business owner while being a new mom. Through this book, you’ll learn how women in any industry can find a balance between their professional life and motherhood without having to compromise either role.

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.