Books like Of Mothers and Others by Donna Allen

Eva grapples with her role as mother after her son Kevin, a teenage boy, murders seven classmates, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. Two years later, she confronts the aftermath and her own doubts.

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

Maya Angelou's memoir of her mother's experiences and the reunion with Vivian Baxter.

A timely collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit that examines gender, feminism, misogyny, and the cultural treatment of women with sharp insight and humor.

It seems no mother of a newborn has ever been more hilarious, more honest, or more touching than Anne Lamott is in Operating Instructions. A single parent whose baby's father is out of the picture, Lamott struggles not only to support her little family by her wits and her writing but to stay sober at the same time. Faith in God helps; so does her loyal band of helpers, from her childless best friend Pammy to her mother and "Aunt Dudu" to the folks at the La Leche League hotline. And between colic, wheat-free diets, and the triumph of solid food, Lamott learns that blessings and losses come together, and that as our capacity for joy increases, so does our capacity for grief.

Ask any woman whose mother has died and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as profoundly changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life. And although a mother's mortality is as inevitable as nightfall, no other book has addressed the lasting effects of this incalculable loss. First published more than a decade ago and now available in this updated edition, Motherless Daughters is still the book that women of all ages look to for understanding and comfort when their mothers die, and it is the book that they continue to press into each other's hands. Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss survivors, this life-affirming book is newly expanded to reflect the author's personal experience with the continued legacy of mother loss. Now married and a mother of young children herself, Hope Edelman better understands how the effects of mother loss change over time and in light of new relationships. This groundbreaking book interweaves the author's own story with those of hundreds of women across the U.S. Their words express how growing up without a mother continues to affect their relationships with others and themselves.