Motherhood Memoir

In A Coat of Yellow Paint, Naomi shares new stories, time-stamped as intimate and vulnerable essays, exploring her faith, personal heartaches, challenges balancing a home life with career, motherhood, and her struggles with infertility. Along the way, Naomi illustrates the urgency of celebrating life’s most important things - family, faith, friendship, and an upright piano painted bright yellow - ignoring the critics.

This is the story of an independent woman who is a model for our time—photographer Toby Molenaar. It begins in Holland during World War II, when her country is decimated by the occupying German army and she is literally left to starve. As a little girl, she learns to be self-sufficient—survival is the order of the day. Courage, indomitable spirit, an open mind, and accountability only to herself are the stuff of this fascinating and inspirational story.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, Phillips illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

Everybody knows that Patricia Heaton plays the hilarious, wise, and tempestuous married-with-kids everywoman on Everybody Loves Raymond. What they might not know is that in real life, she is married, has four boys under eight years old, and is just as funny offscreen as on. Motherhood and Hollywood is Patricia Heaton’s humorous and poignant collection of essays on life, love, marriage, child-rearing, show business, having parents, being a parent, spousal rage, surviving fame, success, and the shame of underarm flab. She is warm, witty, and refreshingly irreverent.

Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens - obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity - one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life's biggest chaos: motherhood.

In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.

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.

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.

From her beginnings as an early blogger, Ree Drummond has become a household name with a passionate following of devoted fans. On her blog, in her magazine, and on her cooking show, Ree shares recipes, tales of her adventures in the country, and stories of everyday life with her four children and cowboy/rancher husband.

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.

With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country, to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They

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.

"There is really no better indicator you're a mother than acquiring the ability to catch throw-up in a plastic bag, disinfect your hands, and immediately ask your friend to pass the beef jerky as you put on another Taylor Swift song and act as if nothing has happened." This is the type of insight Melanie Shankle offers in this quirky memoir of motherhood.

Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style - by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating - which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by the New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.

Sonya Curry’s journey, like those of her extraordinary sons and daughter, was filled with defeats and hard-fought victories, but hers took place out of the limelight, without the eyes of the world watching, cheering, or drawing inspiration from her example. Until now. In this inspiring memoir, Sonya tells her story for the first time, beginning with her childhood in rural Virginia and moving through the peaks and valleys of an incredible life.

With the same down-to-earth wit that made her entertaining memoir sTORI telling a #1 New York Times best-seller, Tori tells the hilarious and humbling stories of life as a mom in the limelight. From learning to be the kind of parent her own mother never was to revealing what it's like to raise a family while everyone is watching, Mommywood is an irresistible snapshot of celebrity parenthood that you won't get from the paparazzi.

What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's - even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own. The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice.

Mothering under normal circumstances takes all you have to give. But what happens when your child is disabled, and sacrificing all you've got and more is the only hope for a decent future? Full of rage and resilience, duty and love, Ashley Bristowe delivers a mother's voice like no other we've heard.

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.

An inspiring memoir, reminding us that whether life's lessons arrive through illness, trauma or any other unexpected upheaval, life really does love us. As a free-spirited, independent woman, Bronnie Ware was used to donning a variety of hats: singer, songwriter, author, speaker, traveller and adventurer. And as her soul would have it in her mid-40s, she felt the urge to add one more: mother.