Motherhood Memoir

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Growing up as the daughter of a dedicated surgeon, Elizabeth L. Silver felt an unquestioned faith in medicine. When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit with sudden seizures, and scans revealed a serious brain bleed, her relationship to medicine began to change. The Tincture of Time is Silver's gorgeous and haunting chronicle of Abby's first year. It's a year of unending tests, doctors' opinions, sleepless nights, and, above all, uncertainty.

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.

Raised in chaos and violence, I carried my wounds into early motherhood, young, overwhelmed, and repeating the very patterns I swore I’d never pass on. I screamed. I hit. I walked away when they needed me most. And eventually, I gave up custody of the children I loved more than anything. This is not a redemption story with a neat bow. It’s a raw, unflinching memoir about what it takes to break generational cycles from the inside out. About failing -deeply- and still choosing to come back. About learning how to parent with intention after years of surviving on instinct.

Alexandra Collier was a writer living in a light-filled Brooklyn brownstone in New York with the man she loved. But when she woke up to a ravenous hunger to have a baby that her partner didn't share, she had to make a choice between love or a future family. From defying her family's expectations to searching for sperm and navigating pregnancy alone, Ally deftly takes us through the ecstatic, complicated and demanding path to becoming a solo mother by choice.

As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family’s garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: She is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life.

Fashion icon, Broadway and Hollywood insider, mob mistress, confidante to notorious gang members of both Crips and Bloods, wife, mother, award-winning journalist, Lon Bing has not followed the typical path through life. From her formative relationship with her mother to her days as a star model to her sisterly relationship with Mama Cass Elliot and ultimate reinvention as the author of the best-selling gang expos, Do or Die, Swans and Pistols details Bing's always exciting and sometimes dangerous life.

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.

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.

On a winter's day in 2002, a bottle shaped like a tear washed up on the English coast. It contained a letter written in French, a lock of hair, and a mystery. Only one thing could be known for certain – that the writer of the letter was a mother, grieving for her lost child, Maurice. Moved by the woman’s heartache, Karen Liebreich sets out on an epic journey to piece together the mother’s tale.

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protege, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother's narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself. But then Jane at seventy-five, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of forty-five years of hidden diaries

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.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

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.

So you thought adulthood would mean a high-flying career and a luxury lifestyle but instead have ended up with a Lycra-based wardrobe and a deep fear of what lies at the bottom of the ball-pit in soft play? Join comedian Sophie McCartney as she voyages deep into the uncharted territories of mating, birthing, feral offspring, mums overdoing it at the watering hole and the perilous viper’s nest of the school WhatsApp group.

Jenn Berney was one of those people who knew she was destined for motherhood - it wasn't a question of if, but when. So when she and her wife, Kelly, decided to start building their family, they took the next logical step: They went to a fertility clinic. But they soon found themselves entrenched in a medical establishment that didn't know what to do with people like them. With no man factoring into their relationship, doctors were at best embarrassed and at worst disparaging of the couple. Soon Jenn found herself stepping outside of the system determined to disregard her.

In the late 1960s, at the age of eighteen and living far from home amidst the thriving counterculture of Ottawa, Marilyn Churley got pregnant. Like thousands of other women of the time she kept the event a secret. Faced with few options, she gave the baby up for adoption. Over twenty years later, as the Ontario NDP government’s minister responsible for all birth, death, and adoption records, including those of her own child, Churley found herself in a surprising and powerful position–fully engaged in the long and difficult battle to reform adoption disclosure laws and find her son.

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.

El testimoni íntim d'una dona embarassada, una reflexió global sobre la maternitat i la condició femenina. Una aportació poc habitual, lluny de tòpics romàntics i ensucrats de la vivència de l'embaràs i la maternitat en totes les seves dimensions, des de la més personal a la social, amb la sensibilitat d'una gran escriptora. Temps d'una espera és el diari que l'autora va escriure ara fa més de trenta-cinc anys quan va saber que estava embarassada per segona vegada.

Dana Bowman can't escape the lure of perfectionism, trying to be a flawless wife, mother, and person in recovery. When Dana experiences a short-lived relapse during the Christmas holiday, she has the startling realization that recovery is more than just giving up alcohol. In this funny and revealing follow-up to her best-selling book Bottled, Dana reflects on how we live in a society of excess, always pushing ourselves to do and be better. However, it doesn’t take her long to realize that self-care and getting over herself is the key to happiness.