📚 Thoughtful and at times provocative

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Heavy Cream, a novel about a teenage girl finding mother figures in unconventional places. It’s out tomorrow from Simon & Schuster. Below, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright recommends four books that complicate motherhood. Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou: Motherhood, in this telling, is not something fixed, either by biology or destiny. Rather than something that, once abandoned, must be permanently forfeited, motherhood is conceived of in this story as a relationship that can be built even belatedly, with enough attention and instructive, thoughtful action. A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis: Édouard Louis’s mother embodies a version of motherhood as something forged under titanic economic, social, and bodily pressures. She is a woman shaped by circumstance, a victim of structural forces, who then caused great damage to her young sons in turn. And yet, in a stunning reversal, the mother reveals herself not to be so stable, as she commits to actively reshaping herself. The story of motherhood, here, becomes something revisable. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr: Mary Karr’s mother is glamorous, gun-wielding, alcoholic, and ...