Reviews

Are momfluencers giving us unrealistic expectations, or showing us how to claim ownership of our work and voices?

The narrator in Naming the Ghost must decide if the ghost is the loss of a parent or the loss of who she was before motherhood.

Reading American Honey reminded this writer of how much common ground we mothers share.

Who gets to tell the story when a marriage falls apart?

Creative mothers need time. Not just hours in the day, but moments of insight or undoing or even a maternal clock. They also need boundaries. A creative mother must not give away “too many pieces of her being.”

In Screaming on the Inside, Grose offers an alternative perspective on my difficulties in combining home and market labor. Grose explains that our cultural “expectations of ideal mother and ideal worker are in an unresolvable conflict.”

The Long Devotion tackles the enormous task of celebrating all of motherhood: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.

The Women Could Fly is a novel rooted in the inherent messiness of parenthood: a mother cannot be known by her child separate from her mothering.

The Other Mother is laced with an overarching theme of doing what is right to protect someone, even if that protection is self-preservation.

The poems in Catastrophic Molting acknowledge our anger while challenging readers to hope for and work for change.

In Mothercare, Tillman shares truths as she sees them, and the result is a sometimes-gritty read that offers advice and resonance for adult children caring for an ailing parent.