|
May 9, 2025 
|
|
|
 |
| Smith Collection/Gado and Sipa, via Associated Press |
Dear readers,
My mom and I won’t be together on Mother’s Day this year — we’ll celebrate later, with terrarium-size gin and tonics and clams à la ajillo out the wazoo. But I won’t be entirely motherless. I have enough fictional parents on my shelves to fill several softball teams, and I will simply have to make do until my actual flesh and blood arrives in New York.
I recently read the novelist Anne Enright’s essay for the Book Review about the role, or lack thereof, of mothers in fiction. It’s a fascinating provocation. “Fiction is a symptom of maternal absence,” she wrote back in 2015. “The story is everything but her.”
So much — thank goodness — has changed in the intervening decade. Even off the top of my head I can think of dozens of books (both fictional and non) that meaningfully grapple with motherhood, including one published this week. In “Second Life,” Amanda Hess, a cultural critic for The Times, writes movingly about what it means to raise children in an age when “the American model of parenting,” as she puts it, is “a punishing and isolated ordeal.”
Sobering, no doubt — yet hopefully a balm for any parents grappling with loneliness, bewilderment or disdain for the mind-numbing vocabulary affixed to various parenting implements (Snoo, Woombie, Ubbi).
Your mind vis-à-vis motherhood and literature might be straying toward a gift-giving bent; if so, you’re in luck. My colleagues assembled a guide of books for every kind of mom. The selections err on the side of newer releases, but don’t skip the comment section if you’re looking for something more specific.
See you next week.
|
MOTHER’S DAY READING, PAST AND PRESENT |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Like this email?
Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at newsletters@nytimes.com. Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance.
|
LOOKING FOR YOUR NEXT READ?P.S.: These pages allow you to keep track of what you’ve read and want to read! |
|
|
|
|
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
|
THIS WEEK IN THE BOOK REVIEW |
|
|
|
|
