Seven titles that reckon with larger-than-life mothers

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Sonoma County, California. She is the author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts. She was a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Huffington Post, Lit Hub, and forthcoming in Poets & Writers. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven

fiction and nonfiction books that engage with the symbolic mother. These works push her away and pull her in, stare into her harsh reflections. They acknowledge the gifts she bears as well as the scars she’s left. They attempt to scale her outsize dimensions, to remember, in the end, that she is human.

One title on the list:

Mother as Echo

The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole

Bankole’s debut novel follows three generations of women as they navigate trauma, tradition, independence, and desire. Beginning in Nigeria, Esther makes the first passage, leaving her husband despite cultural taboo and social ostracization, to start anew in her own flat with her daughter, Amina. Though Esther herself is headstrong and individualistic, she is unsettled to notice those same attributes in her daughter. After Amina moves to the United States, Esther writes in a letter to her: “I wanted you to be like me, yet walk a separate path. I prayed to see you become who I had hoped to be.”

In New Orleans, two pivotal events—the birth of Amina’s daughter Laila and the landfall of Hurricane Katrina—bring about tragedy and hope, forgiveness and regret, reunion and loss. The Edge of Water is a poignant portrayal of lineal ongoingness, the infinite echoing that’s passed from mother to daughter.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue