When you're looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire's series "Buy the Book," we do the heavy lifting for you. We're offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you're looking for—whether you're in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok
At the start of Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife, the protagonist, Pearl, says, “Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.” At some point, most of us have been Pearl. We’ve equally ducked our mother’s kisses and craved her attention. We’ve been besotted and embarrassed by her. We’ve followed her rules and questioned them. We’ve missed her after she’s gone. Our relationships with our mothers and mother figures are complex, but through their love and care, we can begin to discover who we are.
Accordingly, literature has long examined motherhood and the complicated and beautiful dynamics between a mom and her child. These explorations are perhaps one of the best ways to honor them, as they seek to understand, celebrate, and question a mother’s full humanity. From fictional stories about matriarchs that come together in the face of adversity to memoirs about forgiveness after abandonment, books about mother-child relationships have one thing in common: They’ll make you want to call your mom. (We think you should, too.) Below, we’ve rounded up some of the very best, from classics by iconic writers like Maya Angelou to more contemporary titles.
“As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from—where she was born, who her parents were,” writes acclaimed author James McBride in his memoir. For years, he hounded his mother about her background, to which she’d reply, “I’m light-skinned.” Finally, after 14 years of nagging, she acquiesced, shocking McBride with the story of her upbringing. Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in Poland, McBride’s mother and family moved to the Jim Crow South in the 1920s. Years later, his mother fled to Brooklyn after marrying a Black man, seeking a life of acceptance and freedom. When her husband died, she was left to raise 12 children on her own.
Weaving together his mother’s accounts and his own memories, McBride’s memoir reconsiders his experiences in light of learning about her background. This book serves as a crucial reminder that sometimes your mother’s choices may have been informed by a life lived long before you were born.
Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, revisits her relationship with her mother, not only as the person who raised her, but as one of the key tethers to her Korean-American identity. Throughout the book, Zauner recalls memories of her mother, their fights, their meals, and, most harrowing, her mother’s terminal illness. The book, at times, is heart-wrenching.
Zauner’s memoir is a deep study of grief and lost connection without becoming a trauma dump. There’s no grandstanding or overly sentimental proclamations. Rather, Zauner showcases the reality of confronting one of life’s most common inevitabilities: the loss of a parent. Crying in H Mart is a grounded reflection about finding your way back to yourself and reclaiming your roots, even after the person who planted the seeds is gone.
While cleaning out her mother’s things after her death, archivist Danielle Geller found a suitcase full of artifacts from her mother’s youth spent in the Navajo Nation, from photos and notebooks to her personal letters. The discovery inspired Geller to embark on a journey to understand her mother, whose presence in her life was spotty and unstable, disrupted by bouts of addiction.
In pursuit of learning more of her mother’s history and meeting her estranged family, Geller returns to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, painting a sharp relief of how her mother’s challenges fit into the lexicon of hardship, colonialism, injustice, and survival of her people. This book hums with mounting energy that leaps from the page, spurred by Geller’s search for answers.
Perhaps no one listens to a mother’s stories like a daughter. So after Lisa Marie Presley died from surgery complications in 2023, it fell to her daughter Riley Keough to finish the manuscript she had been working on. Delivered in dual voices of Presley and Keough, the memoir explores Presley’s life with compassion and unflinching honesty.
When Keough chimes in, she inserts additional anecdotes or corrections as Presley recounts the highs and lows of her privileged life, from the struggles of growing up in the limelight and her relationship with her father to her marriage to Michael Jackson and starting her own family. At times, reading the memoir can feel like sitting at the kitchen table, having a marathon conversation with the two women, which is to say that it is every bit heartful, layered, and mournful.
Sometimes, you need a little kick in the butt to remember to make the most of your time with your mom. Consider this book a love letter to doing just that.
After Hollywood legend Diane Ladd experienced a potentially life-threatening illness that compromised her lungs, her doctor recommended that she take walks to rebuild her strength. Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, joined her on those walks around L.A., thinking they might be their final moments together. The two turned the conversations—where no topics were off the table—into this memoir.
While many will think of The Joy Luck Club when they think about Amy Tan’s fiction exploring family, her second novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife, zeroes in on the knotty relationship that can occur between mothers and daughters. In this case, it’s protagonist Pearl and her mother, Winnie, whose relationship has been strained since Pearl’s father died. Further complicating matters is the life-altering diagnosis that Pearl is keeping from her mother. Never finding the right time to share the news, she knows Winnie will be angry at her for hiding the information for so long. But Pearl might simply be following in her mother’s footsteps, as Winnie is keeping secrets of her own.
Set in California in the ‘90s and China during WWII, Tan delivers a story wrought with struggle and triumph, loosely pulled from her mother’s life. The Kitchen God’s Wife reminds us of the sacrifices mothers make to give their children opportunities that were perhaps unavailable to them. This book will appeal to fans of Rachel Khong, Elizabeth Strout, and Ann Napolitano for its rich storytelling and lovably imperfect characters.
Full disclosure: This memoir is a tearjerker that’ll have you squeezing your mom extra tight. Natasha Trethewey was 19 when her stepfather murdered her mother. In this devastating memoir, Trethewey, a poet, reveals the brutality of losing her mother, especially while on the brink of adulthood herself. She also illuminates circumstances that surround domestic violence and how the lack of early intervention can result in such tragedies.
The material may be heavy, but it isn’t dense. It is subtly defiant. By refusing to let her mother’s memory end with violence, she honors her strength and resilience.
After leaving her husband, Miriam North brings her daughters back to her ancestral home in Memphis, Tennessee, where her sister August lives. Their home is steeped in history and pain but also joy and perseverance. Told over three timelines, this big-hearted novel follows the various generations of North women as they confront systemic injustices and cultivate resilience through their love for one another. A necessary novel, Memphis showcases the big and small ways Black joy is expressed, even through hardships. With quick chapters and characters you’ll come to love, it’s a wonderful book to read with your mom or book club (or book club with your mom).
While many of us may consider Maya Angelou as our literary mother, she herself is a daughter. Ideal for anyone who’s had challenges with their mother, Angelou’s memoir, Mom & Me & Mom can serve as a blueprint for acceptance and timeworn love. In the book, Angelou recounts being raised by her mother, Vivian Baxter, and her grandparents, who looked after Angelou and her older brother for 10 years when they were children. Like all of Angelou’s work, this is a profound emotional excavation. Throughout the book, Angelou explains how her mother’s early abandonment impacted and molded her, partially, into who she was as an adult.
But this is Maya Angelou we’re talking about. Compassion is on every page as she retells how her mother’s life influenced how she treated her children and how she and Baxter rebuilt a bridge back to one another.
Though many have heaps to say about motherhood, it’s less common to hear from mothers themselves on hot-button topics, persisting myths, and taboos. Fortunately, Sarah Hoover’s new essay collection eviscerates stereotypes about how mothers should act, think, and feel. A N.Y.C.-based gallerist, Hoover endured postpartum depression after giving birth to her son but put on a happy face so no one would know she was struggling in secret.
Throughout the thoughtful essays, Hoover pulls back the curtain on the condition: how it festered and fanned the flames of anxiety over her child’s safety while simultaneously making her feel detached from him. But this is ultimately a hopeful compilation, as Hoover tracks her path to finding help and cultivating a comprehensive support network—making The Motherload an important conversation-starter about how best to support mothers during their entire pregnancy, even after giving birth.
This heartwarming, well-drawn novel depicts a family in motion. For 20 years, Rocky and her family have spent their week-long vacation at the same beach cottage in Cape Cod. Time has trundled by, and now, Rocky finds herself in a confounding life chapter: the sandwich years. No longer the parent of young children and not quite yet the full-time caretaker of elderly parents, Rocky must negotiate her responsibilities that seem to shift by the hour. There’s her marriage (her husband “understands between 20 and 65 percent of everything she says”), her children, her parents, and menopause. Rocky straddles these roles with ferocious vulnerability and the acute awareness that this time is temporary, like the gasp before the wave tumbles over.
Newman’s absolute skill in building atmosphere makes this a must-read for any summer vacation. Her prose will remind you of summer mornings on the beach spent with the people you love most in the world.
Lara Nelson is weathering the COVID-19 pandemic with her husband and three adult daughters at their cherry orchard in northern Michigan. There’s plenty to do: The berries require harvesting, the farm needs tending, and the family must remain safe. But, as Lara and her daughters pick cherries and unwind after long days, Lara regales them with stories of her adolescence and her somewhat accidental foray into becoming an actress. Now that her daughters are grown, Lara unspools details from her life that she once withheld—like meeting her ex-boyfriend, now a movie star, and her time performing the play Our Town. Ultimately, in sharing more about who she was before they were born, she tells them the story of their family.
This quiet novel leaves a big impression, urging readers to ask their mothers about who she was before motherhood. In true Ann Patchett fashion, everything from the characters to the setting is intricately developed, so much so that you’ll swear you can smell a cherry pie baking in the oven.
In 2017, Michele Filgate wrote a viral essay. She’d set out to discuss the abuse she suffered from at the hands of her stepfather but wound up writing about her mother instead. Encouraged by the success of her piece, Filgate decided to dig deeper, asking 15 writers to provide their own essays about a similar topic—the things they don’t discuss with their mothers and what prevents them from broaching the conversation—which became this compilation.
With contributions from authors like Melissa Febos, Brandon Taylor, Bernice McFadden, and Alexander Chee, the stories vibrate off the page as they explore everything from going “no contact” to having a mom who can’t stop oversharing. It should be considered an auto-buy for anyone looking for fresh perspectives on an age-old subject.
