Motherhood Memoir

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.

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?

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protege, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother's narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself. But then Jane at seventy-five, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of forty-five years of hidden diaries

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).

On Fire is an award-winning memoir that fans are calling a heartbreaking and sometimes darkly humorous mother-daughter, coming-of-age tale written with gritty authenticity by author and award-winning journalist Steph West. In this cohesive collection of provocative stories, West details the precarious journey of raising her daughter while going through a quarter-life crisis of her own.

Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity - the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her audiobook brings the past and the present viscerally alive.

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.

Adoption is an act of pure love. The consequences of the act reach far and wide and affect millions of children and adults around the world. Today there is a move towards an open communication between all parties but it was not always so. Before Roe vs. Wade, the entire process of adoption was shrouded in secrecy and in many cases, lies, fear, guilt, coercion, shame and blame were the forces in play for the participants. Learning at a young age about this thing called "adoption," Mr. Bannon spent his life wondering, confused, curious and a little afraid of what might be out there if he ...

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.

Bess Kalb has saved every voicemail message her grandmother - her best friend, her confidante - ever left her until the day she died. In this wildly imaginative memoir, Bobby Bell's voice is still in Bess' head. Stubborn, glamorous, larger than life, she gives Bess critical advice on everything and tells the history that made them both. This unusual love story celebrates the bond of women across generations and the personalities that live on through grief and love.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

After losing four pregnancies with no obvious cause, Jennie Agg set out to understand why miscarriage remains such a profoundly misunderstood, under-researched and under-acknowledged experience. Part-memoir, part-scientific investigation, Life, Almost documents Agg's path to motherhood and her search for answers. Tracing each tentative step of her fifth pregnancy—as her body becomes a creature she does not wish to spook—Agg dismantles the myths that we unquestioningly accept about our reproductive lives.

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.

In these days of nonstop, round-the-clock division, where confrontation is our most prevalent form of entertainment, we’ve forgotten the more fundamental things that unite us. We’ve lost track of the importance of conversations that foster growth, self-reflection, and discovery of one another while cultivating our sense of shared humanity. In her new book, Dear Hartley, Jedediah Bila reignites much-needed conversations about everything from character and empathy to parenting and friendship, from education and family to fitness and food.

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.

As a farm girl in eastern Oregon, feeding bottles to bummer lambs and babysitting her little sister, Jackie Shannon Hollis expected to become a mother someday. After a series of failed relationships, she met Bill, the man she wanted to spend her life with. But he was a man who never wanted children. Saying I do meant saying I don't to a rite of passage her body had prepared her for since puberty.

On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education, she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy - self-made principal of infomercial marketing giant Guthy-Renker - Victoria’s most treasured role is mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson. Suddenly, Victoria’s dream life is broken....

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 harrowing memoir about a woman's struggle with postpartum depression. Nine days after the birth of her daughter, Amanda was involuntarily admitted to a Toronto psychiatric ward for postpartum depression (PPD). The typical hold-and-release process in Ontario is seventy-two hours. She stayed eighteen days.