Best Books About Motherhood: Fiction and Memoir
The best books about motherhood — from We Need to Talk About Kevin and Beloved to Little Fires Everywhere and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Fiction and memoir.
By Lena Fischer
Motherhood is one of the most written-about subjects in fiction and memoir — partly because it is universal and partly because the conventional scripts for it (unconditional love, natural instinct, self-sacrifice) are so often inadequate to the actual experience. The novels below are those that engage most honestly with the contradictions: the love that can coexist with ambivalence, the sacrifices that can be simultaneously generous and destructive, the ways that mothers and children can fail each other even with good intentions.
The Foundational Novel
Beloved — Toni Morrison (1987)
The most morally serious novel about motherhood in American literature — Sethe’s decision to kill her baby daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured into slavery is the act around which the novel circles. Morrison’s examination of what slavery did to the bonds between mothers and children — systematically separating them, using children as leverage, treating maternal love as dangerous — is the context in which Sethe’s act makes a terrible sense. The most demanding novel in this list and the most essential.
Dark and Ambivalent Motherhood
We Need to Talk About Kevin — Lionel Shriver (2003)
Eva’s account of her son Kevin — her failure to feel unconditional love for him, her conviction that something was wrong with him, and the school massacre he eventually committed. Shriver is interested in the taboo around maternal ambivalence: the expectation that mothers will naturally and immediately love their children is so strong that Eva’s failure to do so is read as criminal by her community. The most honest and most uncomfortable novel about motherhood in contemporary fiction.
Everything I Never Told You — Celeste Ng (2014)
Ng’s first novel — the Lees, a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio whose favourite daughter Lydia is found drowned, and the family’s unravelling as each member’s secret burdens are revealed. The novel is partly about parental projection (Lydia’s mother has pushed her daughter to achieve the independence she herself was denied) and about the consequences of the expectations we place on those we love most.
Motherhood Under Pressure
Little Fires Everywhere — Celeste Ng (2017)
Elena Richardson’s perfect life in Shaker Heights and Mia Warren’s disruptive arrival — two mothers whose different relationships to rules, order, and sacrifice are placed in contrast. The novel’s custody case (a Chinese baby whose biological mother wants her back from a white adoptive family) gives the conflict a public dimension and allows Ng to examine the ways that institutions and communities enforce particular models of motherhood.
A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini (2007)
The friendship and eventual bond between two Afghan women trapped in a violent marriage — Mariam and Laila, wives to the same abusive man, who initially resent each other and gradually become the primary relationship of each other’s lives. The novel is about chosen maternity (Mariam becomes a mother to Laila’s children despite having no children of her own) and about the forms of love and sacrifice available to women in a society designed to limit both.
Reading Order
New to the theme: Little Fires Everywhere → A Thousand Splendid Suns → Beloved.
Ambivalent motherhood: We Need to Talk About Kevin → Everything I Never Told You → Beloved.
Complete: Everything I Never Told You → Little Fires Everywhere → A Thousand Splendid Suns → We Need to Talk About Kevin → Beloved.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best novel about motherhood?
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison is the most profound novel about motherhood in American literature — Sethe's decision to kill her baby daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured into slavery is the central act, and the novel's examination of what that act reveals about the nature of maternal love, about what slavery did to the bonds between mothers and children, is the most morally serious account of motherhood in fiction. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) by Lionel Shriver is the most disturbing — a mother who has never felt what she was supposed to feel for her son, and who must now confront whether her ambivalence contributed to his violence.
What is We Need to Talk About Kevin about?
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) by Lionel Shriver is narrated by Eva, whose teenage son Kevin committed a school massacre. The novel is structured as letters from Eva to her estranged husband, examining Kevin's childhood and Eva's failure to feel the unconditional love she expected to feel for her son — and the question of whether this failure made Kevin what he became. Shriver's dark comedy of ambivalent motherhood is the most honest account in fiction of the gap between what mothers are supposed to feel and what they actually feel.
What is Little Fires Everywhere about?
Little Fires Everywhere (2017) by Celeste Ng is set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where the ordered life of Elena Richardson (four children, model home, everything in its place) is disrupted by the arrival of Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. The novel is about motherhood — specifically the contest between the mother who follows the rules and the mother who makes her own — and about a custody case involving a Chinese baby adopted by a white family that divides the community. The most readable of the novels in this list.
What is A Thousand Splendid Suns about?
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) by Khaled Hosseini follows two Afghan women — Mariam, born illegitimate and married off at fifteen to a man thirty years her senior, and Laila, a younger woman who becomes his second wife after her family is killed. Set across thirty years of Afghan history (Soviet occupation, civil war, the Taliban), the novel is primarily about the friendship and love between the two women in a situation designed to keep women isolated from each other, and about the sacrifices that maternal love — including love that is chosen rather than biological — demands.
