Seven books that explore motherhood's complexities

Donna Freitas is the author of a number of award-winning, critically acclaimed books, including the novel The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano (published in twenty languages) and Her One Regret, the memoirs Consent and Wishful Thinking, and over a dozen novels for children and young adults. She has a PhD in Gender Studies and Religion, and teaches creative writing.

At CrimeReads Freitas tagged "seven of my favorite books/series that offer portraits of very complicated motherhood." One title on the list:

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

I think of We Need to Talk About Kevin and [Ashley Audrain's] The Push as a pair, with The Push as the more accessible, kinder, gentler version of We 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.

Read about the other entries on the list.

We Need to Talk about Kevin is on J.A. Rock's list of five books about human horror, Dea Brøvig’s top ten list of books about mothers, Michael Hogan's list of the ten best fictional evil children, Fiona Maazel's list of the ten worst fathers in books, John Mullan's list of ten of the best sentences as book titles, and Shirley Henderson's six best books list.

--Marshal Zeringue