11 Memoirs That Shine the Spotlight on Mothers

by Putsata Reang (comes out May 17, 2022)

An award-winning journalist shares her struggle to make her mother proud by becoming a good Cambodian daughter, while dealing with the fallout after coming out to her, which eventually breaks their bond in two.

by Christopher Sorrentino

In a memoir of familial grief, the author examines the mystery of his mother's life and her withdrawal from everyone and everything she'd ever loved by excavating his own memories and family folklore.

by Kitt Shapiro

Eartha, who was a mix of Black, Cherokee, and white, is viewed by the world as Black. Kitt, her biological daughter, is blonde and light skinned. This is the story of a young girl being raised by her mother, who happened to be one of the most famous celebrities in the world.

by Michael Tubbs

"Don't tell nobody our business," Michael Tubbs's mother often told him growing up. Don't tell anyone about the day-to-day struggle of being Black and broke in Stockton, CA. Don't tell anyone the pain of having an incarcerated father. And also don't tell anyone about the particular joys of growing up with three "moms"-a Nana who never let him miss church, an Auntie who'd take him to the library any time, and a mother, "She-Daddy", who schooled him in the wisdom of hip-hop and taught him never to take no for an answer. At age 26, he became Stockton's youngest and first-ever Black mayor.

by Honor Moore

A daughter's memoir of her mother evolves beautifully into a narrative of the sweeping changes in women's lives in the twentieth century. Vivid and rich, it reads like a nineteenth-century novel as we follow the love story of a woman and her family through the twentieth-century civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements.

by Maya Shanbhag Lang

Lang grew up idolizing her mother, a psychologist who immigrated from India and nurtured a family. But as she becomes her caretaker, Lang learns of secrets from her mother's past that prompt her to accept both myth and reality.

by Natasha Trethewey

The former U.S. poet laureate shares a personal memoir about the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and how this profound experience of loss shaped her as an adult and an artist.

by Trevor Noah

Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents' indiscretion, he was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa's tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt

A poignant correspondence between the CNN journalist and his iconic designer mother, exchanged in the aftermath of the her brief illness, offers a rare window into their relationship and the life lessons imparted by an aging mother to her adult son.

by David Rieff

Rieff's witness of the last nine months of his mother Susan Sontag's life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity.

by James McBride

A young African-American man describes growing up in an all-black Brooklyn housing project, one of twelve children of a white mother and black father, and discusses his mother's contributions to his life and coming to terms with his confusion over his own identity.