Seven books that weigh the choice of motherhood

Alexia Nader is the author of the The Meaning of Daughter. She was a 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow. Her work has been published in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker among other publications. She is from Miami, Florida and currently lives in San Francisco where she teaches creative writing to children and teens.

At Electric Lit Nader tagged seven novels that "have shown me that there are many variations to the questions I grappled with in my novel about what goes into reproductive decisions." One title on the list:

Red at the Bone Jacqueline Woodson

Red at the Bone explores the impacts of an unexpected teen pregnancy, focusing not just on the young father and mother, but their parents too. Through the novel’s first-person rotating point of view, Woodson is able to jump backwards and forwards in time, and we see the teen couple’s parents both as parents—worried about how the pregnancy will affect their children’s futures—and as grandparents, who couldn’t imagine wishing their granddaughter had never been conceived. Through these jumps in time we can also see how the young couple’s respective relationships with their parents affected their desire for intimacy with their daughter once she was born. The novel’s expansive gaze does not shy away from the wounding emotions that can accompany an unexpected pregnancy, as well as the potential for these wounds to change over time.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue