The first time I was called Mom by another adult, my husband and I were out for dinner, our firstborn dozing beside us in her car seat. “What will you have, Mom?” our server asked. I looked down, as if to locate myself: That’s me she’s talking to. It didn’t matter that I was also a partner, a teacher, a colleague, a daughter, a sister, a friend. What I most clearly and emblematically was now, I realized, was a Mom.
I thought of this moment often during my journey to publish my debut book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays (Chronicle Prism, 2025). The first time my mind flashed back to it was during the submission process. I’d prepared myself, as all authors must, for rejection. The editors who passed on my manuscript, I imagined, would point to some aspect of its style or feel that wasn’t working for them. But nearly all of them cited an entirely different “flaw” in it: “I love the writing, but I’m just not sure how I’d break this out from all the other mother books,” one editor wrote to my agent. “The mother shelf,” lamented another, “is just so full.”
I pictured a dusty rack at the back of a bookstore, crammed with miniature mothers jockeying for space. I’m not sure I’d envisioned any sort of “shelf” for my book, but if I had, it would have been the Memoir shelf, or the New Nonfiction shelf. It was true that my book, a deeply personal account of the ways women are urged to betray their truths, explores motherhood. But it also explores adolescence, middle age, desire, infidelity, friendship, beauty, mortality—in short, the sorts of themes that have intrigued humans since time immemorial. Why did this one category, “Mother” with a capital M, so thoroughly negate all others, a badge of shame like Hester Prynne’s scarlet A? I felt as if I were being addressed as “Mom” all over again—this time by not just another adult but an entire industry, and by the very artistic and professional community I cared about most.
It only takes one editor, a friend reassured me—and mercifully, she was right. My book became a book by the skin of its teeth, because of the single editor who believed in its broader appeal. Thankful as I am for her, I’ve remained troubled by the assumed smallness of the audience for books like mine. No one would assume that only soldiers can enjoy war memoirs. No one would claim that the love story has reached its saturation point in the market. Literature centering mothers, by contrast, is often treated as a niche genre, like books about quilting or lady detectives. This sidelining persists even though most of us on earth have had a mother, or are partnered with mothers, or will one day become mothers—even if we aren’t mothers ourselves. I can think of few human experiences that touch us as universally.
The notion of a finite Mother Shelf also suggests that to have read one or two “mother books” is to have read them all, as if mothering were a one-size-fits-all experience rather than the endlessly varied undertaking it is. Many of my favorite contemporary books are by authors who are mothers and whose writing is informed by this identity. But beyond this overlap, these works are as diverse in voice and spirit as the humans who crafted them. When Jennifer Case, an environmental writer in Arkansas, explores the animal physicality of mothering in her gorgeous new essay collection, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), this is not at all the same as when author Camille T. Dungy conjures the intimacies of tending to her daughter in Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023). The styles and genres of my favorite “mother books” vary wildly as well. Rivka Galchen’s spare and lyrical essay collection Little Labors (New Directions, 2016) captures the daily textures of caregiving, while Yael Goldstein-Love’s speculative novel The Possibilities (Random House, 2023) uses psychological suspense to evoke the disorientation of early parenthood. To “shelve” books as divergent as these together is like shelving eggnog with egg bagels because they both contain…eggs? It is to erase these books’ distinctiveness entirely—and it is to do so in a way eerily reminiscent of how I and so many women I know felt after becoming mothers, the fullness of our being reduced to a single identity.
In many books that might easily get housed on the Mother Shelf, motherhood isn’t even the main subject but rather a lens through which another experience gets filtered. In Cindy House’s memoir Mother Noise (Marysue Rucci Books, 2022), the author’s decision to tell her nine-year-old son that she was once a heroin addict becomes a powerful magnifying glass through which a reader comes to understand her recovery journey. And in Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” (Henry Holt, 2024), raising two Black sons infuses Emily Raboteau’s investigation of climate change with heightened urgency. “My pathway into climate writing was through motherhood, simply because I want my children to live,” Raboteau told me in an e-mail, stressing that those of us “concerned about the survival of generations to come ought to be mothering, whether we are mothers or not.”
It’s hard to imagine a more pressing reason to free the “mom book” from its proverbial shelf than this.
An acquaintance of mine, an accomplished novelist, recently told me that after becoming a parent, she began a third novel inspired by this transition. Her agent at the time was far from enthused. “No one wants to read about motherhood anymore,” she pronounced with such airtight certainty that my acquaintance was beset by writer’s block.
This wasn’t this year, or even in the past decade, but in 2008.
Before hearing this anecdote I’d wondered if the “mom book” resistance I’d encountered was simply a case of unlucky timing: Had I written a memoir with the word Mothers in the title at a moment when the world was uniquely sick of mothers? But my acquaintance’s story made me suspect a more perennial problem under the surface.
When I reached out to book marketing and publicity expert Kathleen Schmidt, author of the popular Publishing Confidential newsletter, for insight, she pointed to entrenched assumptions in the book industry about audience and gender: “It’s terrible, and I hate that I’m even saying this,” she told me, “but unless there’s a strong male figure in it, a book written by a woman about womanhood or motherhood is going to be tagged as a book for women, whereas a book by a man tends to be marketed to everyone.” In other words, it isn’t necessarily motherhood but motherhood’s unmistakable relationship to womanhood that can set a book on a rigid, predestined path.
Yael Goldstein-Love experienced this gendering firsthand when launching The Possibilities in 2023. Goldstein-Love, who is also a psychotherapist, feels that her novel is as much about the mysteries of the human mind and quantum mechanics as it is motherhood—but she now sees how these themes got downplayed when her book was positioned. She often wishes she could travel back in time and rewrite the novel’s jacket copy, which was crafted to appeal to women and mothers. “I think the description did a good job getting the book into the mommy machine,” she said, referring to the subgenre of women’s media geared toward mothers, “but I’m not sure the mommy machine was where it truly belonged.”
The Possibilities was recently named a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards. Since then Goldstein-Love has been receiving e-mails from an entirely new fan base, fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts far more diverse in age and gender than her book’s initial audience. Connecting with this new wave of readers has strengthened Goldstein-Love’s conviction that the mother “brand” can be a sort of literary vortex.
“I think it’s really hard to capture anything outside that funnel once you’re in it,” she told me.
In the end, the greatest tragedy of the Mother Shelf isn’t the disservice it does to authors but to the readers it excludes. Literature has always been a means of bridging differences and fostering empathy. To presume that only women can appreciate a book like Mother Noise or Soil or any other that considers motherhood is to grossly underestimate the capacities and imagination of non-female readers.
Two of the most enthusiastic early readers of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters in my MFA program were male, and another was nonbinary. None were parents. One told me how my essay about learning to forgive my mother made them pick up the phone and call their own. Another told me that my exploration of beauty standards helped him better understand his sister’s eating disorder. Would these readers have eventually chanced upon my book if it weren’t a syllabus requirement? Sadly, I’m skeptical.
The undiscoverability of works on the Mother Shelf also has dire implications for our culture at large. In a country where the invisibility of caregiving has paved the way for policies that ignore the needs of families, non-mothers might just be the very readers these stories most urgently need to reach. As We Are Animals author Jennifer Case put it, “So many people who aren’t mothers are making decisions that affect women and mothers. With everything going on around reproductive justice, it’s frustrating how hard it seems for people to conceive that books about motherhood might be relevant to a broader audience.”
If more people were to embody the perspective of women and mothers, how much louder might the rallying cry be for universal paid leave or access to quality maternal health care? How much more outrage might there be over the mounting threats to women’s freedom and autonomy?
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers, like all commercial enterprises, take their cues from the culture in which they operate. People hardly bat an eye anymore when a woman pursues “male” interests, but for a man to do the opposite remains suspect, opening him to ridicule and worse. One of my favorite recent books was Lucas Mann’s riveting collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances (University of Iowa Press, 2024). Did I worry this book might be unsuitable for me because I’m not a man or father? Not for a second. A woman who reads about fatherhood is simply a reader, but a man who reads about motherhood is…what? I shudder to think of the choice words that might go here.
I asked Kathleen Schmidt to imagine she’d been hired to expand a publisher’s readership of its “women’s” titles: What strategies would she suggest? She mentioned what she called micro-targeting—picturing, in detail, the categories of readers who might connect with a book and meeting them where they are. “If the desired customer is male,” she said, “what brands do they like? Where are they shopping? What podcasts are they listening to?” She believes the best way to reach secondary readers is to emphasize aspects of a book that overlap with their existing interests: “It’s very hard to reverse the marketing and say that a woman’s memoir should appeal to men. You can’t change the psyche of the consumer. You have to work with what’s already there.”
Practically speaking, this approach makes perfect sense and reminds me a little of when I hide my dog’s heartworm pill in a scoop of peanut butter. It doesn’t matter why he eats it—just that he eats it. And yet the idealist in me can’t help but believe that, over time, with small shifts in the way we talk about, write about, and recommend the “mother book,” it is in fact possible for its stigma to fall away. A magazine roundup of books by mothers for Father’s Day? Yes, please. Elif Shafak’s Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood (Penguin, 2012) on the first-year syllabus? Why not? A company-wide read of Lessons for Survival? Bring it on.
For all of the term’s anonymity, what is any one “consumer,” after all, but a human, as capable of expanding and evolving as any other member of our species? The consumer could very well be your brother, your parent, your child, the love of your life.
The consumer could even be you—in which case, I say, Welcome. Thank you for reading this far. And now, if you’ll come with me: There’s a shelf I need to show you at the back of the store.
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in the Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays 2024 anthology. She lives outside of Boston with her family.
Thumbnail credit: Bella Wang