Jasmina Odor's Favourite Books About MotherhoodLike this list

8 items

• The Long Form

  Briggs, Kate (Teacher)

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  An extraordinary novel that satisfied my desire to see my experience mirrored: the minutiae of baby care, the close-up, sensory experience of feedings and wakings on the one hand, and on the other, the creative impulses that arise in relation to it,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Life's Work

  on Becoming a Mother

  Cusk, Rachel, 1967-

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  I was gifted this book while expecting my first child, and thought it was intelligent and interesting. And then I had my son, and remembered the book and thought, Oh, now I get it. There is a story of Cusk taking her two-week-old daughter to a café…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Mother Reader

  Essential Writings on Motherhood

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  The editor of this collection, Moyra Davey, writes in the introduction that she had her first baby at 38, a baby with colic, and that reading and seeing her experience reflected in stories sustained her through the infant years. This book did…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Lost Daughter

  Ferrante, Elena

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  Lovers of Ferranti won’t have missed this novel, with its fascinating plot of a woman alone on a seaside vacation becoming a witness to and participant in a family drama that echoes her own past and temporary abandonment of her young daughters – the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Essential Labor

  Mothering as Social Change

  Garbes, Angela

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  A timely book that, like others on this list, combines personal narrative with cultural analysis, and discusses what we should discuss more often: the great devaluation of care work, especially the devaluation of non-white, non-hetero mothers and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Motherhood

  Heti, Sheila, 1976-

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  Heti’s novel is a 38-year-old’s woman’s contemplation of whether to become a mother, structured to appear as if unfolding in real time, articulating the narrator’s ambivalences and desires in all their personal and social and political…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Matrescence

  on the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

  Jones, Lucy (Journalist)

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  This fascinating book justifies calling a woman’s transition into motherhood “a metamorphosis” and giving the transition its own new word, matrescence. Jones uses her personal experience to examine our social and medical neglect of the extraordinary…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose | Goodreads

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  A book-length essay that is a mix of philosophy and psychoanalysis, which I love for the way it brings to the surface the subconscious symbolic structures that make us glorify and punish mothers in ways that do real harm to real women. Its…Read moreRead more of this annotation