As a mother, I have kept my fair share of secrets. I have declared “I’m fine” after a harrowing fifty-two-hour labor, where I thought I might actually die. At the end of it, my daughter’s bluish body was draped across my chest, and I thought: What do I do now? I have smiled and talked about the perils of raising a toddler with my girlfriends, all of us tiptoeing around the harsh truth: This shit is hard. Full stop.
I have lied to myself when motherhood has literally brought me to my knees, and I’ve wondered: Am I like Mommie Dearest? I have perpetuated the stereotypical lies of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus.
Which always leads me to ask: Can you have secrets because you love someone?
In other ways on my parenting journey, I have been a staunch truth-teller, deciding that I would rather my daughter know how her mother truly feels, how the world really works, what’s real, what’s possible, and how to forge your own unique path in a sea of conformity.
However, in fiction, all bets are off. It wasn’t until I became a mother that I became a novelist who wrote about mothers. All I wanted was to probe deeper into motherhood, on the page and off. Mothers who make bad choices. Mothers who love deeply. Mothers who kill. Mothers who save. Mothers who keep secrets. In my latest novel, Dear Mother, I explore all of these concepts and more.
In the vein of secret-keeping, here are seven interesting reads about the secrets mothers keep.
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Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
Calling all feral mothers! A stay-at-home mother struggles with isolation and loss of identity after childbirth and becomes convinced she is physically transforming into a dog, blurring the line between psychological break and surreal metamorphosis. (Who hasn’t experienced the “primal” nature of becoming a mother? I know I have.)
Though this seems fantastical at first, there are so many relatable threads to Yoder’s book as she masterfully explains the ins and outs of being a stay-at-home mother.
Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born
Two women confront pregnancy and motherhood after a prenatal diagnosis introduces the possibility of disability, forcing difficult decisions about fear, responsibility, and what it means to bring a child into the world. This book explores maternity and motherhood along the entire spectrum: from the woman who doesn’t want to be a mother but still finds herself drawn to the child of a troubled neighbor, to the woman who gets pregnant only to be faced with unimaginable hardships.
This is such a beautifully crafted, nuanced perspective on motherhood, one that so many women (myself included) will relate to.
Ann Patchett, Tom Lake
Ann Patchett is known for her stunning, sweeping novels, and Tom Lake is no exception. During the COVID-19 lockdown, a mother recounts a youthful love affair to her daughters, revealing how memory, storytelling, and selective disclosure shape family relationships across generations.
This book reminds us how family ties bind us to one another, how daughters learn invaluable life lessons from their mothers and use them to weave their own futures.
Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman
A pregnant woman visiting her husband’s family finds her concerns increasingly dismissed as medical authority and familial control tighten around her, creating an atmosphere of psychological and bodily threat. Abbott perfectly captures that suffocating feeling of being ignored, dismissed, or even controlled for your own good. It’s about women being excluded from the conversations about their own rights and bodies, and what the effects are.
This book is chilling in every sense of the word.
Nora Murphy, The New Mother
A woman moves through the early days of motherhood as anxiety, isolation, and unspoken resentment begin to reshape her marriage and sense of self. (Been there.) The novel traces how small moments of dismissal and disconnection quietly accumulate, altering the emotional landscape of a family.
I loved its attention to the inner life of a woman unraveling in plain sight and the way it captures how loneliness can exist even inside a shared home.
Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here
If you love magic, dead bodies, and gothic tales, this one’s for you. This collection of surreal and gothic stories centers on mothers, daughters, grief, and absence, often unfolding inside fractured families and emotional voids. The stories resist neat resolution and instead linger in unease, longing, and loss.
I loved Sparks’s willingness to let darkness sit on the page without too much explanation and her ability to capture the ache of what often goes unsaid when it comes to motherhood.
Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers
After a single mistake, a mother is placed into a state-run reform program designed to evaluate and correct maternal behavior, subjecting her to constant surveillance and judgment. The novel exposes how quickly care becomes “controlling” when motherhood is measured by systems rather than any sort of humanity.
I loved how Chan interrogates punishment and fear while asking what happens when love is monitored instead of felt.
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