Books About the Complexities of Parenthood

Perhaps no contemporary book exemplifies the drama of choosing so much as Sheila Heti’s memoiristic novel about whether or not to have a baby. The narrator flips coins, consults the I Ching, wonders, and waffles; along the way, she discovers herself.

This novel, in part about miscarriage and in part about the very concept of an ending, does something special: it forms shape out of ambivalence.

This novel, about a Japanese office worker who fakes a pregnancy, is a funny, sharp musing on what living in a pronatalist society does to women’s selfhood.

This novel follows three people who come together to have a baby – a cis woman who gets accidentally pregnant, a trans woman, and a trans woman who has detransitioned and is now living as a man again. The trio flirts with the possibility of a utopian reinvention of parenting while also confronting their own flaws and human dramas.

Kincaid is a mother, but she often wrote about women who resisted their own reproductive capacity. This novel is about, as Kincaid puts it, “a fertile woman who decides not to be.” Also, no one writes mothers like Kincaid.

Historian Heffington has written a thoroughly readable, accessible book about the tradition of not childbearing – the many incarnations we’ve seen of childless and child-free movements, and how society responds to people who choose not to bear children.

This fantastic critical memoir – think The Argonauts in form – is a beautiful reflection on waiting and hoping for a baby, while enduring the fertility industrial complex. A friend of mine who read this while trying to conceive found it a great comfort. I have never tried to have a child and found it equally liberating.

Cusk’s memoir/essays about motherhood are some of the keenest work about parenting I’ve ever read. I discussed it constantly with friends while we decided whether or not we wanted kids.

The ur-critical memoir from the brilliant Nelson, The Argonauts pairs Nelson’s pregnancy with her partner Harry’s top surgery, giving us a beautiful musing on what it means for all of us to be transforming and transitioning, all the time.

Ramos’s novel about women working at a surrogacy clinic is an engaging look at what goes into modern childbearing.