The Book of Mother
The Book of Mother

Author: Violaine Huisman

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1982108800

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A New York Times Notable Book A Library Journal Best Book of 2021 A “marvelous…superbly effective” (The New Yorker) debut novel about a young woman coming of age with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes. Met by rave reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and more, this stunning translation of Violaine Huisman’s “witty, immersive autofiction showcases a Parisian childhood with a charismatic, depressed parent” (Oprah Daily). Beautiful and magnetic, Catherine, a.k.a. “Maman,” smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly, and her daughter Violaine wouldn’t have it any other way. But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. Even as Violaine and her sister long for their mother’s return, once she’s back Maman’s violent mood swings and flagrant disregard for personal boundaries soon turn their home into an emotional landmine. As the story of Catherine’s own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive. With spectacular ferocity of language, a streak of dark humor, and stunning emotional bravery, The Book of Mother is an exquisitely wrought story of a mother’s dizzying heights and devastating lows, and a daughter who must hold her memory close in order to surrender, and finally move on.

The Mothers
The Mothers

Author: Brit Bennett

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0399184511

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It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken beauty. Mourning her mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. It's not serious-- until the pregnancy. As years move by, Nadia, Luke, and her friend Aubrey are living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently?

Mother In the Dark
Mother In the Dark

Author: Kayla Maiuri

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0593083296

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"Tender and unsparing, this is a novel to hold onto." —Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me “A masterfully written novel, alive and lyrical, a hypnotic rendering of the mess and the tenderness of family life.” —Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had A novel about family secrets and a volatile relationship between a mother and her daughters. When Anna’s sister calls with an urgent message, Anna doesn’t return the call. She knows it’s about their mother. Growing up in an Italian American family in working-class Boston, Anna lives a simple but comfortable childhood--filled with homemade meals and front-porch gatherings in a close-knit neighborhood. She and her sisters are devoted to their mother, orbiting her like the sun, trying to keep up with her loving but mercurial nature. When their father gets a new job outside the city, the family is tossed unceremoniously into a middle-class suburban existence. Anna's mother is suddenly adrift, and the darkness lurking inside her ignites. Her daughters, isolated and trapped with her in their new house, do everything they can to keep her from unraveling. Alternating between Anna's childhood and her twenties, when she receives a shattering call about her mother that threatens to blow up her precariously constructed life in New York, Mother in the Dark asks whether we can ever return home when the idea of home is fraught with instability. This story about sisterhood, the complications of class, and the chains of inheritance between mothers and daughters delivers an unvarnished portrayal of the fragile horrors of domestic life and a young woman consumed by her past.

Literary Mama
Literary Mama

Author: Andrea J. Buchanan

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 2009-11-10

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1580053351

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Becoming a mother takes more than the physical act of giving birth or completing an adoption: it takes birthing oneself as a mother through psychological, intellectual, and spiritual work that continues throughout life. Yet most women’s stories of personal growth after motherhood tend to remain untold. As writers and mothers, Andrea Buchanan and Amy Hudock were frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of writing by mothers that captured the ambiguity, complexity, and humor of their experiences. So they decided to create the place they wanted to find, with the kind of writing they wanted to read. This unique collection features the best of the online magazine literarymama.com, a site devoted to mama-centric writing with fresh voices, superior craft, and vivid imagery. While the majority of literature on parenting is not literary or is not written by mothers, this book is both. Including creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Literary Mama celebrates the voices of the maternally inclined, paves the way for other writer mamas, and honors the difficult and rewarding work women do as they move into motherhood.

Mother Country
Mother Country

Author: Jacinda Townsend

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1644451751

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Winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Shortlisted for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author. Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life. In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.

Are You My Mother?
Are You My Mother?

Author: Alison Bechdel

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0547524366

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The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

Mother to Mother
Mother to Mother

Author: Sindiwe Magona

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0807007129

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A searing novel, told in letter form, that explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman whose Black son has just murdered a white woman Mother to Mother is a novel with depth, at once an emotional plea for compassion and understanding, and a sharp look at the impacts of colonialism and apartheid on South African families. Inspired by the true story of Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl's murder, the book takes the form of a letter to the victim’s mother. The murderer’s mother, Mandisa, speaks of a life marked by oppression and injustice. Through her writing, Mandisa reveals a colonized society that not only allowed but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished Black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. This book is not an apology for the murder but rather something more. It seeks to connect, through empathy and storytelling, one pained mother with another who is grief-stricken and in mourning. A beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence, Mother to Mother will resonate with readers interested in understanding and ending racial injustice, as well as the lasting colonial foundations of oppression.

My Mother Was a Computer
My Mother Was a Computer

Author: N. Katherine Hayles

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-03-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0226321495

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We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.