Reviews

In Mary Crockett Hill’s poem “The Fat Cat,” one line in particular stands out: “Someone should write a manual for avoiding random horrors.” Although that manual may not exist, three…

When my daughter, Stella, was born six years ago, I felt completely unprepared for motherhood. This had to do in part with the circumstances of Stella’s birth — she was…

Motherhood, for most of us, comes with its own language. We learn to divide our experience into trimesters; we become familiar with all things maternal, including “instinct,” “bond” and “leave.”…

Full disclosure: I did not want to read Cancer Is a Bitch (Or, I’d Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis). I suffer from what Henry James evocatively called “an imagination…

I had forgotten about how much Sylvia Plath’s writing had once meant to me, much less that she had been a mother of two children when she died. Nicholas was…

Children in most tribal cultures learn that their “grandmothers” include not only the mothers of their parents, but a wide circle of women who are to be honored for their…

I watched the towers fall on 9/11 with my daughter, who was eight months old. I fell too; depression set in, and for the first time since my daughter was…

A change occurs when I tell people outside the military community that I am an Army spouse. It’s a small one, certainly. In fact, the shift may be imperceptible to…

When our children can’t feed or dress themselves, when they fall and skin their knees or become feverishly ill, of course they need us. But as mothers, how long should…

Conversations with my 86-year-old grandmother dissolve into an eerie déjà vu. Last week, we talked at length about my sister-in-law’s pregnancy. I answered the same questions she posed the last…

In 2001, I attended an open meeting about female academics and motherhood at the Graduate Division of the University of California at Berkeley. At the time, my two-year-old daughter was…