Reading List
Books About Motherhood
A five-year-old boy thinks the room he lives in with his mother is the whole world. A professor on a beach holiday admits to a stranger that she once left her own daughters. A woman in her late thirties flips coins to decide whether to have a child. A daughter stands in a Korean supermarket and cries, because her mother is dead and the food is still there. These twelve books, memoir, essays and fiction, are about motherhood as it is lived: the love, the loss of self, the anger and the guilt, from both sides of the relationship.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Memoir, Essays & Fiction · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
Start with A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk if you are a mother, or Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner if you are thinking about your own mother. The twelve books below include classic feminist essays, memoirs by mothers and by daughters, and five novels, with a guide further down to where to begin.
The list at a glance
- 01Of Woman Born Adrienne Rich
- 02A Life’s Work Rachel Cusk
- 03The Argonauts Maggie Nelson
- 04Motherhood Sheila Heti
- 05Blue Nights Joan Didion
- 06Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel
- 07Crying in H Mart Michelle Zauner
- 08I’m Glad My Mom Died Jennette McCurdy
- 09The Lost Daughter Elena Ferrante
- 10Beloved Toni Morrison
- 11Room Emma Donoghue
- 12Nightbitch Rachel Yoder
Twelve books about motherhood
Of Woman Born
The poet Adrienne Rich, a mother of three sons, separates motherhood as an experience from motherhood as an institution: the set of rules, expectations and silences that society builds around it. She draws on her own journals from the years her children were small.
Why read itThe book that made it possible to write honestly about the dark side of motherhood. Almost every later book on this list owes something to it.
A Life’s Work
Cusk describes the first year of her daughter’s life with a frankness that caused a storm when it appeared: the boredom, the loss of self and the strangeness of the love. Its subtitle is “On Becoming a Mother”.
Why read itThe book many new mothers say made them feel less alone, precisely because it does not pretend.
The Argonauts
Nelson writes about her pregnancy alongside her partner Harry Dodge’s gender transition, and about building a family that does not fit any rule. It mixes memoir with theory and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Why read itA book about what a family can be, and about how a body changes, written with great tenderness.
Motherhood
A writer in her late thirties tries to decide whether to have a child, asking questions of coins, of her own family history and of her partner, and argues with herself on every page.
Why read itThe one book on this list about not having children, and about what it means to make that choice.
Blue Nights
Didion writes about her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, who died in 2005 at the age of thirty-nine, and about her own fears as a mother and as she grew older herself.
Why read itShort and heartbreaking: a mother looking back and asking what she missed.
Are You My Mother?
After Fun Home, about her father, Bechdel turned to her mother: a distant, intellectual woman who stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven. She tells the story through her own therapy and the ideas of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
Why read itFor readers who want to understand their own mother, and how a daughter becomes who she is through and against her.
Crying in H Mart
The musician behind Japanese Breakfast writes about her Korean mother’s illness and death from cancer, about their difficult closeness, and about the Korean food through which she tries to keep her mother with her.
Why read itThe book on this list that readers pass on most to their own mothers and daughters.
I’m Glad My Mom Died
The former child star of iCarly describes how her mother pushed her into acting and controlled her career, her body and her life, and how long it took her to see that what she called love was something else.
Why read itThe provocative title hides a careful, often funny book about breaking away from a mother you were taught to adore.
The Lost Daughter
Leda, a professor on a beach holiday in the south of Italy, watches a young mother and her small daughter and is drawn into their family, while admitting what she has never told anyone: that she once left her own daughters for three years.
Why read itNo novel is more honest about the ambivalence of motherhood. It was made into a film by Maggie Gyllenhaal in 2021.
Beloved
Years after escaping slavery, Sethe lives in a house in Ohio haunted by the daughter she killed rather than let her be taken back into slavery. Then a young woman called Beloved arrives. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
Why read itThe most extreme book on this list about what a mother’s love can drive her to do.
Room
Jack is five and has lived his whole life in one locked room with his mother, who was kidnapped as a student. He narrates, and for him the room is the world; for her, it is a prison she has made into a home for him. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Why read itA thriller about captivity that is really about a mother protecting her child’s sense of the world.
Nightbitch
An artist who has given up her work to stay at home with her toddler becomes convinced that she is turning into a dog: her teeth are sharper, her hair is coarser, and she wants to howl.
Why read itFunny, strange and furious, for every mother who has felt her old self disappear.
Not sure where to start?
If you are a new mother
→ Read A Life’s Work.
If you are thinking about your own mother
→ Read Crying in H Mart, then Are You My Mother?.
If you are not sure whether you want children
→ Read Motherhood by Sheila Heti.
If you would rather read a novel
→ Read The Lost Daughter, then Beloved.
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Frequently asked questions about books on motherhood
What is the best book about motherhood?
A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk is the most honest memoir of early motherhood, and Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born is the classic that made such honesty possible.
What are good books about mothers and daughters?
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy are three very different memoirs by daughters about their mothers.
What is a good novel about motherhood?
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, about a mother who once left her daughters, and Room by Emma Donoghue, about a mother raising her son in captivity.
Is there a book about deciding not to have children?
Motherhood by Sheila Heti follows a woman in her late thirties as she tries to decide whether to have a child at all.
What books are about the dark side of motherhood?
Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante all write about anger, ambivalence and the loss of self that motherhood can bring.
Footnotes
- Prizes: The Argonauts, National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 2015; Beloved, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988; Room, Booker Prize shortlist 2010.
- The Lost Daughter appeared in Italian in 2006 and in English in 2008, translated by Ann Goldstein.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
More books I keep coming back to are on my personal bookshelf, and every month one of them goes out to the Night Owl Bookclub.
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I update this list as I read. New picks go to my monthly newsletter first.
