Mothers: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood

by Katrina Kenison

Book Overview

This remarkable collection of twenty stories about motherhood by writers who are mothers evokes every stage of the journey, from pregnancy and birth through the childhood years, adolescence, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865474982
• ISBN13: 9780865474987
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 343 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Jewels of Motherhood

With authors such as Perri Klass, Laurie Colwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Marian Thurm, Melissa Pritchard, Jane Shapiro, Alice Elliott Dark and many other talented artists, this collection takes time to read because each selection asks to be chewed, swallowed and digested before moving on to the next. Previously published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Glamour, Zyzzyva, Redbook, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review and the Atlantic Monthly, these stories attempt to relate the challenges and frustrations mothers face in today's society and the way that women experience the transformation of motherhood.The stories are arranged chronologically in the life of a mother. That is to say the first speaks only of a woman assuming her pregnancy, and the last describes the relationship between an 81 year-old mother and her 60 year-old daughter. Subsequent to each selection, the authors have added short explanations about how the story came to be or what has come of it since first being published. While many stories celebrate motherhood, some stories, such as Pagan Night by Kate Braverman, are disturbing and shock the reader into new insights concerning the harsh realities some mothers are forced to face.At the end, without realizing it, the reader has aquired a necklace, having placed each gem, new and different and beautiful in its own right on a chain to be carried away close to her heart.

Every mother can find herself in and benefit from this book.

I discovered this book in the library by chance. I was trying to hustle my screaming, writhing 1 year-old into the youth department when this title jumped out at me from the shelves of the new adult arrivals. As a stay-at-home Mom for 3 years now, my feelings for my children have run the gamut from head-over-heels "new baby bliss" to the frighteningly real urge to run away from my toddler without looking back. Until I read this collection of short stories by female authors (some famous, others first time writers,) I had never come across any serious literature pertaining to motherhood that depicted it as anything other than a "joy" or a "miracle". This book showed me that I was not alone in my struggle to be a good Mom. The stories in this book explore a whole range of emotion and unite women the world over. What mother can't relate to battling with a reluctant toddler at bath time? A headstrong teenager determined to go her own way? Or even an adult child dying of AIDS? The stories about childbirth amazed me with their similarities to my own experiences even though I may have very little in common with the characters themselves. Stories of mothers struggling with their children and fantasizing of harming them or abandoning them disturbed me and enlightened me at the same time because not until this book did I really believe that I was not the only mother in the world who sometimes hated and resented her children. Stories of mothers worrying about their adolescent and adult children gave me courage to face the future but have forced me to re-evaluate my assumptions about my own mother and the process of aging. The reading of each story felt a lot like sitting down to share a cup of coffee with that story's main character. A real give and take started to evolve as I realized that I could always relate to the character's situation either as a mother or as a daughter. It is impossible to read one of these stories without seeing a little of yourself in it. Hirsch and Kenison have put together a truly wonderful and liberating book. Any mother who has tucked a child into bed at night and wondered where she will find the strength to face the next morning will greatly benefit from reading this collection of stories.