Motherhood Memoir

Growing up as the daughter of a dedicated surgeon, Elizabeth L. Silver felt an unquestioned faith in medicine. When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit with sudden seizures, and scans revealed a serious brain bleed, her relationship to medicine began to change. The Tincture of Time is Silver's gorgeous and haunting chronicle of Abby's first year. It's a year of unending tests, doctors' opinions, sleepless nights, and, above all, uncertainty.

Following on from the success of Your Baby, Your Birth, renowned birth and parenting Coach Hollie de Cruz applies her much-loved approach to the first year of motherhood. This empowering and thought-provoking book will guide you through the ever-changing landscape of your baby's first year, month by month, and will help you feel assured that you know your baby best.

Stories, memories and life lessons from an Australian icon.

When a doctor pronounced Dara-Lynn Weiss's daughter Bea obese at age seven, the mother of two knew she had to take action. But how could a woman with her own food and body issues - not to mention spotty eating habits - successfully parent a little girl around the issue of obesity?

When Catharine H. Murray travels to a small town on the banks of the Mekong River to work at a refugee camp, she falls in love and marries a local man with whom she has three sons. When their middle son is diagnosed with cancer at age five, their pursuit of a cure takes them from Thailand to Seattle, before they eventually return to Thailand, settling on a remote mountaintop. Full of honesty and grace, Now You See the Sky allows the listener to witness the fathomless loss of a beloved child and learn how tragedy can transform us, expand our vision, and make us more fully alive.

Attention all potty-mouthed, cheap-wine-drinking mothers: Prepare to meet your match. Any bad thought you’ve had about your kids, Nicole Knepper has had worse. Much worse. It’s not that she doesn’t love her kids. It’s that she understands what a mind-f*?% it can be to try to civilize those wild little beasts.

As it turns out, it's entirely possible for the people we've lost to come back to us when we need them the most. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice navigates it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood, and allow herself to be a daughter once more, in order to take care of her own girls.

The week before Thanksgiving 2011, Dustin Smiley left for a yearlong military deployment. Soon after, his son Ford, 11, invited Senator Susan Collins to fill his dad's chair at dinner. On January 3, 2012, Senator Collins came to dinner...and brought brownies. So began Dinner with the Smileys, nationally syndicated columnist Sarah Smiley's 52-week commitment to fill her husband's place at the family dinner table with interesting people - from schoolteachers to Olympians, professional athletes to famous authors, comedians to politicians - and unique role models for her three sons, even as she knows Dustin's seat cannot truly be "filled"

An only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother Dorothy, a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flare that made her the darling of men and women alike. Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts to raise while she was the star of a vibrant social life.

So you thought adulthood would mean a high-flying career and a luxury lifestyle but instead have ended up with a Lycra-based wardrobe and a deep fear of what lies at the bottom of the ball-pit in soft play? Join comedian Sophie McCartney as she voyages deep into the uncharted territories of mating, birthing, feral offspring, mums overdoing it at the watering hole and the perilous viper’s nest of the school WhatsApp group.

A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming of age in the wake of immense loss and her mission to know the woman who gave her life. When Sarah Perry was 12, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah's bedroom.

Follow this family of six on their passage - extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreakingly poignant-from Bright Lights (of New York City) to the Northern Lights (of Norway) to the City of Light (Paris) to the speed-of-light of the Autobahn (in Munich). Continue deep into the tropics of Southeast Asia (Singapore) and end your voyage in the heights of the Swiss Alps (Geneva).

Sophie Ellis-Bextor's kitchen discos became a source of much-needed escapism, catharsis and sequined joy for a swathe of the population during lockdown. From knackered mothers and fed-up fathers, to cooped up partiers with nowhere to go, Sophie's gloriously chaotic Friday kitchen performances have cheered and revived us. Now Sophie is bringing that same mixture of down-to-earth candour and optimistic sparkle to her first book. Part memoir, part musings, Sophie will write about the conjuring act of adulthood and motherhood.

When eight-year-old Leah's parents get divorced, her mother, Cessie, flees her conventional life as a suburban housewife in search of a glamorous big city career in journalism. In the chaotic years that follow, Cessie lurches from one apartment, job and toxic romance to the next, with her adoring daughter in tow. Cessie describes her parenting style as 'benign neglect', and their family motto, 'Commitment sucks the life right out of you', is tacked up on every rental fridge. In the aftermath of a disturbing sexual experience at a pool party, Leah finds herself crippled with anxiety.

Impossible Motherhood is a heartrending and ultimately triumphant testimonial told by a writer looking back on her history of addiction. Abortion has never offered any honest person easy answers. Vilar's dark journey through self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and historical hauntings is a powerful story of loss and mourning that bravely delves into selfhood, national identity, reproductive freedom, family responsibility, and finally motherhood itself - today, Vilar is the mother of two beautiful children.

Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays.

Moving and immersive, and crafted with wisdom, disarming humour and raw honesty, The Unfamiliar casts a fresh eye on motherhood and challenges our assumptions about pregnancy, gender roles, queer identity and what it means to be a parent.

A Still Life is a story of illness and pain that rarely sees the light: illness and pain with no end or resolution; illness and pain that we must meet with courage, joy, ingenuity and hope. Against a world which values ‘feel good’ progress and productivity above all else, Josie sets out a quietly radical alternative: to value and treasure life for life itself, with all its defeats and victories, with all its great and small miracles.

Part memoir and part self-help guide, Chemical Khichdi provides a pathway for anyone with a mental health condition and the family, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals that love and care for them. Empathetic, candid and accessible, it outlines ‘seven therapies’ that have enabled Aparna to ‘hack’ her mental health and find equilibrium over the years, and shows how you or someone you know can also do the same.

Eloquent. Philosophical. Introspective. These are not the words usually associated with an autistic child. But in a remarkable display of courage and creativity, a boy named Tito has shattered stereotypes, and in The Mind Tree makes us question all of our previous assumptions about autism. For Tito is severely autistic and nearly nonverbal, and this is his story.