Motherhood Memoirs from Around the World

In Breathe, author, critic, and historian Imani Perry writes movingly about what it means to raise Black sons in America. It is at once a letter to her sons, a memoir sifting through her life and her son’s formative years, and a resounding challenge to society to see her sons—and all Black children—as precious and deserving of humanity. At one point in the midst of Breathe, Perry writes, “I live for the life of the mind and heart.” It’s a simple statement in the midst of so much that’s insightful and profound in the collection but it struck me as a perfect capturing of the book. Breathe is a thoughtful and intimate glimpse into one of the brightest minds writing today but there is an equal amount of care and heart. It’s a special combination that I’ve treasured.

Gabriela Wiener is an award-winning Peruvian journalist and author who is known for her wild explorations of sex, identity, and gender. Her personal accounts in the book Sexographies, also translated by Jessica Powell, range from infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison to detailed encounters at sex clubs and being whipped by a dominatrix in public. In Nine Moons, she approaches her pregnancy and motherhood in a similar full-bodied approach. One of my favorite early images in the book is her growing pile of books on motherhood next to her recent research on various sexual subcultures. Her work is fierce and funny and brilliant, and it’s a necessary and exhilarating addition to the genre as she discusses so much that is often left unsaid in other books about motherhood—like her abortions and her lust.

I loved Jazmina Barrera’s debut work of nonfiction, On Lighthouses, translated by the legend Christina MacSweeney, where she melds memoir and literary history while examining what lighthouses mean to her and more widely to us all through the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. So it’s no surprise that I would love her exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, and art. Like On Lighthouses, Linea Negra is a memoir and also so much more. Barrera chronicles her own pregnancy and early motherhood while also reflecting on representations of motherhood in art and literature. I was particularly struck by the collection of resources she presents at the back of the book—poems, short stories, interviews, and essays—that she read while breastfeeding, the act of the artist feeding herself as she feeds her child. This urgent and intimate book is one of the most stunning I’ve ever read.

In Vitro overwhelmed me on my first reading. It is a stunning meditation on motherhood and in vitro fertilization and all that the procedure and many other fertility treatments encompass—bodies, science, humanity, patience, grief, and so much more. The book feels like both an essay and a diary and each entry is crushingly intimate and honest. It’s a realness that I crave when I read books on pregnancy and motherhood, and I found myself enthralled by the brevity and intensity of the writing and the white space on each page that speaks to longing and possibility. I was deeply moved by Robin Myers’s translator’s note where she writes that she felt “raw and porous” as she translated the text, saying “it wasn’t so much that I identified with the stories it tells as I felt instantly exposed to them, vulnerable to what they might stir up in me.”

Iman Mersal is considered by many to be Egypt’s premier poet, and I’d argue she’s one of the world’s foremost poets. She is also the author of Traces of Enayat, winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award—making Mersal the first woman to win in the literature category. In that remarkable work of creative nonfiction, Mersal retraces the mysterious life and loss of Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who took her life in 1963, at the age of 27, four years before the publication of her novel. Motherhood and Its Ghosts comes in the same vein as that fascinating and multilayered project. In this book, Mersal writes about her own mother, who died giving birth at age 27. Mersal has only one photo of her mother, and years later, when Mersal becomes a mother herself, she begins to think about the nature of motherhood. She muses on its many representations—the images, dreams, and ghosts of motherhood—using photographs, readings, and her own journal entries. The result is a searching, intimate, and captivating volume that deserves a place among the best writing and thinking about motherhood.

Sometimes classics are classics for a very good reason and such is the case with Maggie Nelson’s genre-bending memoir The Argonauts. Nelson writes of gender, sexuality, queer family-making, and motherhood as only she could, blending the words of theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with her own personal story and sharp observations. It is somehow both raw and romantic and while many have focused on the radical and political nature of the book over the years, I find I’m often thinking about the intimate and tender moments of partnership and parenting in the book.