Six notable bad moms from fiction

Ej Dickson is a senior writer at New York magazine’s The Cut. She previously worked as a senior writer for Rolling Stone and her writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Elle, and many others. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Dickson's new book is One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate.

At Lit Hub Dickson tagged six "favorite bad moms from fiction, from the archetypical overbearing suburban Jewish bubbes to horny housewives." One title on the list:

Frida Liu; School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

This book by Jessamine Chan crept its way into my marrow and refused to get out. It is absolutely chilling and it shaped my perspective on a lot of the issues I discuss in my book. It’s basically a dystopian black comedy (though really there’s nothing funny about it) about a single mom who gets sent by a judge to a yearlong school for good mothers after she has a momentary freak out and leaves her child alone in her crib to pick up some papers at her office. She and the other mothers (who are mostly women of color, as is the case in real life with mothers whose kids are removed by the state) are subject to an increasingly impossible series of tasks to prove their worth as mothers, which of course makes it impossible for them to get their kids back. It’s chillingly inspired by a true story and it’s the most terrifying book I have ever read.

Read about the other entries on Dickson's list at Lit Hub.

School for Good Mothers is among Ainslie Hogarth's eight titles about monstrous mothers.

--Marshal Zeringue