Five best books on mothers of many sorts

Elizabeth Lowry has worked as an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and as the deputy headmistress of a girls’ school. She contributes frequently to the London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, and has also written for Harper’s Magazine and Granta.

Her debut novel is The Bellini Madonna.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books about mothers of many sorts. including:

A Life's Work
by Rachel Cusk (2001)

The meaning of enduring in both its senses—of suffering and persistence—is at the heart of Rachel Cusk's laceratingly frank account of the dissolution of self triggered by caring for a small baby. Her memoir names the disorientation, boredom and anguish that other firsthand stories of motherhood tiptoe around; she articulates the uncomfortable truth that becoming a mother involves a wholesale demolition of identity. When Cusk's daughter suffers from colic for three grueling months, the ordeal marks a rebirth for mother and child: "She has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood, this mere sufficiency, this presence." Indispensable reading for anyone who either is a mother or has one.

Read about a novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue