Motherhood Memoir

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

Attention all potty-mouthed, cheap-wine-drinking mothers: Prepare to meet your match. Any bad thought you’ve had about your kids, Nicole Knepper has had worse. Much worse. It’s not that she doesn’t love her kids. It’s that she understands what a mind-f*?% it can be to try to civilize those wild little beasts.

From Golda to Ginsburg, Yentl to Mama Rose, Tallulah to the Queen of Mean, Tovah Feldshuh has always played powerful women who aren't afraid to sit at the table with the big boys and rule their world. But offstage, Tovah struggled to fulfill the one role she never auditioned for: Lily Feldshuh's only daughter. Tovah shares the highs and lows of a remarkable career that has spanned five decades, and shares the lessons that she has learned, often the hard way, about how to live a life in the spotlight, strive for excellence, and still get along with your mother.

In Mother to Son, Jasmine Holmes shares a series of powerful letters to her young son. These are about her journey as an African American Christian and what she wants her son to know as he grows and approaches the world as a Black man. Holmes deals head-on with issues ranging from discipleship and marriage to biblical justice. She invites us to listen as she reminds Wynn that his identity is firmly planted in the person and work of Jesus Christ, even when the topic is one as emotionally charged as race in America.

Seventeen years ago, when Rebecca Thompson endured a string of life-threatening pregnancy losses and rare medical conditions, her training as a physician didn’t protect her from feeling isolated and overwhelmed. What she longed for was a community of women—or even one encouraging story—to reassure her that she wasn’t alone. Deciding to create the community she couldn’t find in her own time of need, Dr. Thompson reached out to friends, patients, and medical colleagues and asked them to share the stories of their personal journeys to parenthood.

A harrowing memoir about a woman's struggle with postpartum depression. Nine days after the birth of her daughter, Amanda was involuntarily admitted to a Toronto psychiatric ward for postpartum depression (PPD). The typical hold-and-release process in Ontario is seventy-two hours. She stayed eighteen days.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor's kitchen discos became a source of much-needed escapism, catharsis and sequined joy for a swathe of the population during lockdown. From knackered mothers and fed-up fathers, to cooped up partiers with nowhere to go, Sophie's gloriously chaotic Friday kitchen performances have cheered and revived us. Now Sophie is bringing that same mixture of down-to-earth candour and optimistic sparkle to her first book. Part memoir, part musings, Sophie will write about the conjuring act of adulthood and motherhood.

Facing the prospect of a career-ending disability as she adjusts to life with multiple sclerosis, Dr. Lisa Doggett is forced to deal with a new level of uncertainty and vulnerability, and the everyday fear that something new will go wrong. Taking off her white coat—becoming a patient herself—she confronts unimaginable fears, copes with her limitations, and sidesteps her skepticism of alternative medicine to seek help from unlikely sources. MS pushes Doggett—a perfectionist at heart—to embrace self-compassion.

Lene Fogelberg is dying - she is sure of it - but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood - will I die young? - is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: She is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?

"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life", a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly.

When Madeleine Dean discovered that her son Harry was stealing from the family to feed a painkiller addiction, she was days away from taking the biggest risk of her life: running for statewide office in Pennsylvania. For years, she had sensed something was wrong. Harry was losing weight and losing friends. He had lost the brightness in his eyes and voice, changing from a young boy with boundless enthusiasm to a shadow of himself, chasing something she could not see. Now her worst fears had come to light.

In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift, questioning her marriage, her profession, and her place in the larger world. Into her stagnant routine dropped Dodo, her three-year-old daughter Maya's curiously disruptive imaginary friend. Worried about how to handle Dodo's apparent hold on their daughter, she and her husband made the unlikely choice to take Maya to healers in Belize, hoping that a shaman might help them banish Dodo, and all he represented, from their lives.

In this cohesive collection of provocative stories, West details the precarious journey of raising her daughter while going through a quarter-life crisis of her own. She writes intimately about their mother-daughter relationship and how it, and Savannah's belief in her, kept her going every day despite their brush with homelessness, an attempted sexual assault on West, and multiple career derailments including losing a job at a major sports league.

A Mother’s Tears is a memoir that explores the relationships between perseverance, disease, and never-ending determination. It is conveyed through the hardships of a woman brought up under Communist rule who eventually escapes the confined conditions of her home country only to find out she now has a physical conflict to fight. It is a heart-wrenching journey down the corridors of cancer, drugs and alcohol, and loneliness as a mother tries anything she can to make sure that both she and her son live to fight their own personal battles another day.

Eloquent. Philosophical. Introspective. These are not the words usually associated with an autistic child. But in a remarkable display of courage and creativity, a boy named Tito has shattered stereotypes, and in The Mind Tree makes us question all of our previous assumptions about autism. For Tito is severely autistic and nearly nonverbal, and this is his story.

A Ingrid Rojas Contreras la magia le corre por las venas. No era una niña fácil de sorprender: creció en medio de la violencia política de los años ochenta y noventa en Colombia, en una casa siempre atestada de gente que venía a que su madre le leyera el futuro. Su abuelo materno, Nono, era un curandero de renombre, dotado de lo que la familia llamaba “los secretos”: el poder de hablar con los muertos, predecir el futuro, tratar a los enfermos y mover las nubes. La madre de Ingrid, la primera mujer en heredar los secretos, era igualmente poderosa.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

Kate Braestrup's life was transformed by the loss of her husband; now Kate faces the possibility that she may lose her son. As a young mother, Kate Braestrup discovered the fierce protectiveness that accompanies parenthood. In the intervening years - through mourning her husband and the joy of remarriage and a blended family - Kate has absorbed the rewards and complications of that spirit. But when her eldest son joins the marines, Kate is at a crossroads.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Fugitives from a man as alluring as he is violent, Andrea Jarrell and her mother develop a powerful, unusual bond. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she's put that chapter of her life behind her - until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees that it's her mother's choices she's been trying to escape all along. Without preaching or prescribing, I'm the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.