In the opening pages of The Paper Palace, the protagonist has a thought that made me want to throw the book across the room, not to mention scream bloody murder: “The best lesson my mother ever taught me: there are two things in life you never regret—a baby and a swim.”
It’s tossed out as though it’s a given for everyone—and I suppose to many people, it is. But for me? That single sentence pushed hard into the deepest button I’ve got. It prompted me to stop reading the book. I couldn’t bear it. Throwaway statements (and beliefs) like these assumed to be universally true for women are what steal a woman’s real feelings from her own mouth, and forbid her from speaking them out loud.
I knew from the time I was very young that I didn’t want children. Yet once I reached my 30s everyone was pushing me to ignore my gut and have a baby anyway. The cacophony of voices arguing that if I didn’t overcome my resistance I’d eventually regret the decision for the rest of my life was relentless. Ruthless even. Yet not a single person worried about the other possible outcome: that if I ignored my gut and became a mother, I might regret having had the baby.
Beliefs like these and the way I was hounded are what compelled me to write The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano about a woman who doesn’t want children, whose marriage has come to rest on whether she’ll change her mind.
They’re also behind my forthcoming thriller, Her One Regret, about a woman (Lucy) who vanishes from a parking lot, leaving her baby behind in a shopping cart—everyone assumes she was taken. We soon learn that maybe Lucy wasn’t kidnapped after all—that maybe she planned her own disappearance because she regrets becoming a mother.
Her One Regret hinges on that question: Was Lucy taken or did she run?
I’ve come to think of Her One Regret as “The 10th Rose.”
In The Nine Lives readers see Rose’s life twist and turn depending on whether she has a child even though she doesn’t want one, or whether she stands her ground and doesn’t become a mother. But the version of Rose I was too afraid to write was the one based on my own greatest fear: the Rose where she has the baby and then regrets it.
To be frank, I thought if I wrote that Rose, the novel would not get published, because openly discussing motherhood regret is still so taboo. Yet after many emails from readers who wanted to know why I hadn’t given them a Rose who regrets—I finally decided to write that story. It emerged as a crime and suspense novel, Her One Regret, that turns on Lucy Mendoza’s disappearance.
Times have changed even in the last few years, and we are having many more complicated conversations about being a mother, and about choosing not to become a mother, and even (yes, at least a little) about regretting having children. But we still have a long way to go. Here are seven of my favorite books/series that offer portraits of very complicated motherhood.
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Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, The Abandoners
This is riveting nonfiction, that pushes through the assumption that while, sure, men leave their children and families all the time (we expect it, it’s common, it’s barely a shrug), when a woman does the same we say she “abandoned” her children and family. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz takes readers on a tour of women across history, culture, and literature who’ve gone ahead and become mothers, then have decided it’s not for them for reasons personal and also painful (her portrait of Joni Mitchell might be my favorite).
Throughout it all, Gómez Urzaiz is also exploring her own experiences of new motherhood and pushing through the whys of her resistance—and even anger toward—the very women whose stories she offers us.
Ashley Audrain, The Push
I couldn’t put down The Push way back when it came out. It’s based on every mother’s (and parent’s) darkest nightmare: What if my child turns out to be a psychopath?
But The Push takes it farther, and wonders: What if my child—who I’m pretty sure is a psychopath—also killed her baby brother, whose carriage she intentionally pushed into oncoming traffic? Readers explore this terrifying situation via the mother, Blythe, whose marriage and life has fallen apart because of her suspicions about her daughter, Violet—and because of course, everyone dismisses Blythe’s suspicions about Violet as impossible.
A powerful thread Audrain also runs through the main narrative is a backstory about Blythe’s relationship with her own, complicated mother and what she may or may not have inherited on this front. This novel is a powder keg of waiting to see if anyone will finally take Blythe’s beliefs about Violet seriously—and what new terrible thing will happen if and when they don’t.
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
I think of We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Push as a pair, with The Push as the more accessible, kinder, gentler version of e Need to Talk About Kevin. Yeah. So not for the faint of heart.
Shriver’s novel is about a similar circumstance yet told in reverse (Shriver’s novel came first, by the way, before Audrain’s): Eva’s young son, Kevin, has already committed mass murder on the scale of Columbine, and we are with Eva after the fact as she parses out how this possibly could have happened, and her share of the responsibility because she’s Kevin’s mother—but also how this became her life when she didn’t really want to become a mother in the first place.
Whenever I recommend this book to people I do so with a strong caveat: this is one of the darkest novels I’ve ever read. But I absolutely could not put it down, the writing is extraordinary, and I’d venture that the portrait of motherhood is one of the most complex I’ve ever read. And even though we already know that horrific tragedy has occurred when we begin the novel—we still cannot stop turning pages to find out how and why as well as the extent of the tragedy. Utterly shocking and compelling.
Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
Perhaps as a palate cleanser if you end up reading, We Need to Talk about Kevin, you can turn to Yoder’s Nightbitch, about a new mother who suspects she’s starting to turn into a dog (for example, she becomes convinced early on she’s growing a tale.) This is one long, funny, biting fever dream about the earliest days and months of new motherhood, in all its ambivalence, rage, confusion, and the kinds of things that happen when you never sleep.
One of my favorite things about “the mother” in this novel, is how clever Yoder approaches this stage in a mother’s life—with her very name being replaced by “the mother” as though she no longer is anything but, and how Yoder hilariously displays the ways that husbands/fathers abandon women to this stage of child-rearing, and roundly dismiss the concerns their wives might raise as just their “imagination” playing tricks.
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet
If you haven’t already picked up My Brilliant Friend and all its sequels, I am so jealous of you. I spent an entire summer immersed in Ferrante’s extraordinary saga which chronicles not only the friendship from childhood into old age between two fascinating women best friends, Elena and Lila, but offers one of the most honest portraits of motherly love and resentment and everything in between (same goes for marriage here) that I’ve ever come across.
In fact, my choice for Rose’s last name—Napolitano—in The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano, is an homage to Ferrante and her fearless portrayal of women in all their complexities, as mothers certainly, but also as women with desires we often don’t like to believe exist, so we ignore them and pretend they don’t. Not to be missed.
Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
A Proper Marriage is Lessing’s follow up to Martha Quest, where Martha becomes very disillusioned not only with marriage but also with motherhood. Pair this with The Fifth Child, yet another novel about the ways having a child can upend a woman’s life and a marriage.
Full disclosure: these two novels are on my TBR list, for a variety of reasons. First, because, well, Doris Lessing—fascinating, Nobel Prize-winning woman writer, who people love to judge for her own life choices which lead some to regard her as a monster-mother who abandoned her children. What put A Proper Marriage on my radar is the Doris Lessing chapter in The Abandoners; and Molly Odintz of Crimereads suggested Lessing’s The Fifth Child as a perfect novel for this list.
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