Reviews

Two recent anthologies offer up stories about the notion of desiring (or not desiring) motherhood. As Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence…

As a new mother, I seek literature that reflects my parenting experiences. Beth Ann Fennelly’s book of poems, Tender Hooks, artfully explores the wrenching beauty and pain of motherhood with…

In her introduction, Sandra Poulin calls The Mother-to-Mother Postpartum Depression Support Book: Real Stories from Women Who Lived Through It and Recovered: “the book I searched for when I had…

In her review of Susan Davis’s and Gina Hyams’s anthology Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Intense Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies, Rachel Iverson examines how the essays…

…And maybe most of all, even if my worst fears were realized, I wanted to know that motherhood was worth it. That’s why the subtitle of Rebecca Walker’s latest memoir…

Actress Victoria Rowell’s memoir The Women Who Raised Me, is a tribute to the numerous women who welcomed her into their homes and hearts when, at birth, she became a…

Few book titles are as catchy as My Father Married Your Mother. The essays in this anthology tread the squishy ground that represents what some have dubbed the “post-nuclear” or…

Rachel Sarah begins her memoir, Single Mom Seeking: Play Dates, Blind Dates, and Other Dispatches from the Dating World, this way: “My life was not supposed to look like this.”…

It rarely matters which text we are discussing: nonfiction about the AIDS epidemic, the latest chick lit, a novel set in India. Inevitably, my book group will begin comparing its…

In the year before I became a mother, I discovered mindfulness meditation. The beauty and simplicity of practice greatly appealed to me. I spent a lot of time on silent…

I would love to love Kari Anne Roy’s Haiku Mama. Haiku — a classic Japanese form most often consisting of three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables —…