I am more than a little obsessed with reading memoirs about motherhood. It is not inexplicable, for I have three young children of my own, aged five and under. In this intense period of parenting, whereby my tired head spins sometimes from simply trying to remember to call the right one by the right name and endlessly loading the washing machine, reading these individual experiences of mothers has helped me feel less alone. Less afraid.
I’ve been spoilt for choice – you can’t help but browse a bookstore without stumbling upon yet another first-person account of motherhood. In the last year especially, motherhood memoirs have become as much of a trend as thrillers with the word “Girl” in the title once were. I’ve certainly noticed, and read, many more memoirs on motherhood since expecting my youngest child, now two, than when my eldest child was born five and a half years ago.
Upon my own bookshelves, keeping me company in stolen time are: And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I was Ready by Meaghan O’Connell (about finding yourself unexpectedly pregnant while living the lifestyle of a New York writer), The Motherhood Affidavits by Laura Jean Baker (about her lifelong depression, cured by the pregnancy and “love” hormone oxytocin; she has five children); Things That Helped by Jessica Friedmann (an astonishing collection of essays exploring recovery from postnatal depression) and A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk (about everything you could possibly imagine about motherhood). These are just four of the memoirs I own that I’ve happened to pick out; I could easily go on. I have many more versions of these stories that write of motherhood in raw, brutal, physical terms but which also celebrate it without excess sentimentality, showing motherhood for what it is, at once momentous and mundane. Stories that simply show a love so profound for which sometimes I struggle to find the words.
It is strange that it has taken publishers so long to see that there is a place for motherhood in non-fiction literature beyond tips on sleep training or weaning. I am deeply grateful for these memoirs for all the reasons that we are ordinarily grateful for books that bravely share a glimpse into somebody else’s truth. I’m grateful for their beauty, for the momentary escape into someone else’s life, for reminding me that there is a power in being both mother and writer, for showing me that one can be both.
But within these memoirs for all that I feel comfort I still also feel lost. I am in search of myself within these pages, but I don’t always see myself there. So far almost all the versions of motherhood I have read, and all the ones that I am recommended, are overwhelmingly white.
Last year the Paris Review published a list of 21 books on motherhood; not one was by a woman of colour. The Guardian’s top 10 books on motherhood, albeit slightly older, managed to include two men (Tolstoy and DH Lawrence) but still no women of colour. There are countless other such pieces (I often scour these sort of pieces late at night, looking for more motherhood memoirs to read), that recommend books offering a certain sort of white narrative on motherhood, exclusive in its privilege, its childcare, its challenges, its introspective reflection over a glass of wine with friends.
This is not to say that there are absolutely no memoirs on the theme of motherhood by women of colour – but they are significantly and depressingly rare. Toni Morrison wrote beautifully of motherhood in interviews and essays and I often return to her words, taking much strength from them. In Mom & Me & Mom, Maya Angelou wrote about her relationship with her grandmother and mother. More recently I discovered Like a Mother by Angela Garbes (which explores the science of pregnancy alongside feminism and her Filipina roots), and All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (about Chung’s upbringing by a white family after her Korean birth parents put her up for adoption; but more about family than the experience of being a mother). I wish I could include more, but hey are hard to find, because even when they exist they are rarely mentioned in reviews or roundups on popular books about motherhood, write-ups that might then influence us to borrow or buy and then read.
I have longed to read a modern motherhood memoir by a writer who, like me, is of south Asian heritage. I have longed to read of how she might have written about choosing names for her sons that connect them to their origins without making them an unpronounceable laughing stock at school or teased for sounding like terrorists, or how she deliberates over which parts of her inherited culture she might choose to ignore. It’s not always easy to talk about these things in parenting groups because first, where do you begin, and second, in my experience at least, even those can feel isolating (I once gatecrashed a National Childbirth Trust group before realising that it wasn’t for me, that being the only woman of south Asian origin there made me feel more and not less alone). Perhaps these are my own insecurities to overcome, but I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that motherhood can sometimes seem even more overwhelming when you’re caught halfway, juggling layers of cultures and religions and obligations and judgments in a way which perhaps the white narrative of mainstream motherhood doesn’t always have to.
I have longed to read about all of this, but I’ve not found it, so I’m writing a little bit about it in my second book instead. But this too is not easy. There are other reasons why it’s hard to find memoirs on motherhood by women of colour. Put simply: it is already hard enough to be published if you’re a writer of colour. It’s also harder if you’re a woman. Harder too if you’re a mother, battling for the time to write and raise a family. Put it all together – a woman writer of colour who is also a mother – and our odds of being published are slim. Perhaps this is why our personal stories and memoirs about how we navigate the mess and the joy of motherhood will rarely be told.
But it matters. It matters because while motherhood is so intense and so intimate it is also wildly universal; after all, even if we’ve not all given birth we have all been born. Motherhood is, in this very simple way, naturally inclusive, which is why it’s all the more important to make sure that the books on the subject are too. For the more perspectives we read, the more empathy we might have towards mothers of all backgrounds, all colours. The more we might even come to understand what this immense, magnificent thing called motherhood really is.
• Huma Qureshi is a former Guardian staff writer and now a freelance features writer
