We live in an era where divulging dark secrets is de rigueur and being driven to drink by your kids is practically a content vertical on websites such as Scary Mommy. This surge in confessional books about child-bearing is part of a larger cultural trend. There are memoirs of sudden pregnancy (“ And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready,” by Meaghan O’Connell) and struggling to conceive (“ An Excellent Choice: Panic and Joy on My Solo Path to Motherhood,” by Emma Brockes) accounts of postpartum depression (“ Things That Helped,” by Jessica Friedmann) and postpartum euphoria (“ The Motherhood Affidavits,” by Laura Jean Baker) novels about whether to have children (“ Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti), novels about mothering someone else’s children (“ That Kind of Mother,” by Rumaan Alam), even novels about killing children (“ The Perfect Nanny,” by Leila Slimani, and “ The Perfect Mother,” by Aimee Molloy - part of a genre grouped under the ghastly moniker “mom thrillers”). Last year, the newspaper’s literary critic Parul Sehgal – herself a new mother – remarked in awe upon the massive surge of motherhood books published in Cusk’s wake: As Cusk’s fame and renown has grown, so too has the genre she transformed. More than 15 years later, the Times couldn’t have been more wrong. In 2002, when Rachel Cusk published A Life’s Work, the New York Times pronounced her motherhood memoir funny and smart.
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