Top Ten Momoirs

I got this from The Momoir Project, the writing classes I took, and thought you would all enjoy...

The Top Ten Momoirs: Our list of the best memoirs about motherhood

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 12:26 PM PDT
by Danielle Christopher


Here’s our list of the Top Ten Momoirs, or best memoirs about motherhood. We know how hard it is to find time to read, but hopefully, you can get started on some of the books on this list over the summer. All are fantastic and compelling. If we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments section below. What’s your favorite momoir?

1. Falling Apart In One Piece, by Stacy Morrison

Stacy Morrison thought everything in her life had come together, until her husband of ten years announced that he wanted a divorce. She was left alone with a new house that needed a lot of work, a new baby who needed a lot of attention, and a new job in the high-pressure world of New York magazine publishing, helming Redbook Magazine.

Morrison had never been one to believe in happy fairy tale endings. As far as she was concerned, happy endings were the product of the ambition and hard work, the stuff that propelled her to the top of her profession. But, she had always considered her relationship with her husband a safe place in her often stressful life. Her honest and intimate account of being a working mother, while trying to make sense of her unravelling marriage, offers unexpected lessons of love, forgiveness, and dignity that will really resonate for most mothers.

2. This is Not The Story You Think It Is, by Laura Munson

When Laura Munson’s essay was published, The New York Times was so flooded with responses that they had to close down the comments feature. Readers wrote in saying that they had sent the column to all of their friends. Therapists wrote Munson to tell her that they were passing it out to their clients.
Laura detailed what happened when her husband of more than twenty years told her he wasn’t sure he loved her anymore and wanted to move out. And while you might think you know where this story is going, this isn’t the story you think it is. Laura’s response to her husband: I don’t buy it.

In this often funny memoir, Munson recounts a period of months in which her faith in herself and her marriage was put to the test. Finally, at age forty, Laura realized she had to stop basing her happiness on things outside her control and commit herself to an “End of Suffering.” This Is Not The Story You Think It Is chronicles a woman coming to terms with the myths we tell ourselves-and others-about our life, and realizing that ultimately happiness is completely within our control.

3. Petite Anglaise, by Catherine Sanderson

She has a job in Paris, the city of her dreams, a handsome Frenchman, a beautiful bilingual toddler and a charming apartment with breathtaking views. Stuck in a relationship quickly losing its heat, overwhelmed by the burdens of motherhood, and restless in a dead-end administrative job, Catherine reads an article about starting an online diary, and on a slow day at work—voilà—Petite Anglaise, the blog, is born. Catherine ends up sharing intimate details about her relationship, discontents, and most impulsive desires—a daily soap opera starring herself, her lover (Mr. Frog), and their daughter (Tadpole).


When a faithful reader tries to get close to the girl behind the blog, the lines between Catherine’s real and virtual personas blur. It tempts her to think of leaving Mr. Frog and the life she has worked so hard to construct. Propelled by her alter ego and cheered on by thousands of readers, Catherine’s life spirals to exhilarating highs and dizzying lows as her life, and her creation, collide head-on and she must somehow make peace with both.

4. I Love Your Laugh, by Jessica Holmes

In this hilarious memoir, Jessica Holmes, a fan favourite on the hit shows The Holmes Show and Royal Canadian Air Farce, offers her witty observations. She covers everything from her eclectic upbringing by a right-wing Mormon father and a feminist mother, to her experiences as a missionary in Venezuela, to her own trial-and-error adventures in childrearing. Delving into personal experiences never discussed before, Holmes reveals her struggle to find laughter off-stage and spins comedy gold from her fumbles. The combination makes for a heart-warming, and thoroughly side-splitting treat.

5. Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls

Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination by teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.”

Later, when the money ran out and the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to a dismal West Virginia mining town. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her siblings had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts, tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds. But also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family, that despite its profound flaws, gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

6. An Innocent, A Broad, by Ann Leary

When Ann Leary and her husband, then unknown actor-comedian Denis Leary, flew to London in the early nineties for a brief getaway during Ann’s second trimester of pregnancy, neither anticipated the adventure that was in store for them. The morning after their arrival, Ann’s water broke as they strolled through London’s streets. A week later their son, Jack, was born weighing only two pounds, six ounces, and it would be five long months before mother and son could return to the States.

Ann was a stranger in a strange land plunged abruptly into a world of breast pumps and midwives, blood oxygen levels, mad cow disease, and poll tax riots. Desperately worried about the health of her baby, Ann struggled to adapt to motherhood while having to make sense of a very different culture. This momoir is an intimate family memoir, a lively travelogue, and a sweet love story.

7. Bossypants, by Tina Fey

It is perhaps that healthy sense of incongruity that makes the head writer, executive producer, and star of NBC’s Emmy Award-winning 30 Rock such a cogent observer and social critic. Bossypants, her entertaining new memoir, shows that strangeness has been her constant companion. Fey’s stories about her childhood in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania are only appetizers for LOL forays into her college disasters, honeymoon catastrophes, and Saturday Night Live shenanigans.

8. Because I Said So, by Camille Pearl and Kate Moses

You will recognize this book from the suggested books from Cori’s Momoir classes. The challenges facing mothers in the twenty-first century go well beyond tantrum control and potty training. Camille Peri and Kate Moses have once again compiled a selection of intimate and fiercely honest essays on the profound issues that affect women and their children. Because I Said So offers thirty-three unique perspectives on motherhood from such writers as Janet Fitch, Mariane Pearl, Ayelet Waldman, Mary Roach, Rosellen Brown, Mary Morris, and Ana Castillo.

Witty and wise, their stories range from the anguish of giving up child custody, to the guilt of having sex in an era of sexless marriages, and from learning to love the full-speed testosterone chaos of boys, to raising girls in a pervasively sexualized culture. Something for everyone.

9. Torn: True Stories Of Modern Motherhood, An anthology edited by Samantha Walravens

This new anthology includes an essay by our own Momoir Alum, Liesl Jurock. In her essay, Cupcake Crazy, she writes: “ Something about the table of treats in front of us definitely signified some kind of measure of our motherhood. I wasn’t sure if my plate of crackers and cheese scored me on the ‘good mom’ scoreboard or the ‘bad mom’ one.”

TORN touches on universal themes of identity and struggle and gives voice to the hopes and fears of professional women who are in the throes of motherhood. The reader may take comfort in the knowledge that each essay reveals the real challenge facing women today is not juggling their many roles, but re-evaluating their expectations of what is possible and accepting that we can’t do it all.

10. Double Lives, An anthology of mother writers edited by Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and Cathy Stonehouse

This anthology, which focuses on mothering and writing, is a great collection of twenty-two writers, who range in reputation from seasoned professionals to new writers. Each reveals the intimate challenges and private rewards of nurturing children while pursuing the passion to write. Varying widely in age, marital status, sexual orientation, culture/ethnicity, and philosophical stance, authors such as Stephanie Bolster, Linda Spalding, Sally Ito and Rachel Rose and our own Cori Howard, help our understanding of how writer and mother can co-exist.