These eight books approach motherhood without treating it as an automatic source of fulfilment. In a 2022 Mother’s Day reading list, Scroll.in writer Sayari Debnath brings together fiction and memoir about bodily change, ambivalence, family-making, poverty, protection and grief. The selection makes room for mothers’ attachments and sacrifices while also showing the pressures and difficult choices that can shape them.
Motherhood, bodies and the demands of care
Several books in the list examine what happens when motherhood changes a person’s body, relationships and daily life. They do not offer a single account of that change: one turns it into surreal transformation, another reflects on pregnancy and family through questions of gender and identity.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Nelson’s book reflects on gender fluidity, transition, pregnancy and family, as well as her relationship with her own mother. In the list’s framing, these strands make motherhood part of a broader inquiry into how people understand gender, intimacy and kinship.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Yoder’s novel uses an exaggerated bodily transformation to explore the demands placed on mothers. The Scroll.in article connects that transformation to sexuality, marriage and work, bringing the frustrations and pressures of domestic life into view rather than presenting caregiving as effortless.
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Choosing motherhood—and defining family
Not every story of motherhood begins with certainty or follows a conventional path to parenthood. These books consider both the possibility of declining motherhood and the barriers that can complicate efforts to build a family.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Heti’s book explores the uncertainty of whether to become a mother and the possibility of defining a woman’s life without motherhood. Its inclusion makes the question of choice central: a life without children is not treated as an absence that needs explaining away.
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Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
The article describes a trans woman’s desire for motherhood and places adoption within a wider consideration of the obstacles trans people may face when seeking to form families. The book adds a perspective often left out of conventional narratives about who can become a parent and how family can be made.
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
Chambers’s novel centres on an unusual claim about conception. In Debnath’s account, the story also turns on fierce maternal protectiveness and the need to safeguard a child amid public scrutiny, linking private family life with other people’s judgments.
When money and gender narrow a mother’s choices
The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
Emecheta’s novel follows Nnu Ego through poverty, gendered expectations and sacrifice. The list highlights how those forces constrain her opportunities, making the title’s promise ironic: the story asks what “joy” can mean when a mother’s life is shaped by material hardship and demands placed on women.
Protection and grief
Maternal attachment appears in sharply different circumstances in the remaining books: as an effort to protect a child from danger, and as a relationship continuing through bereavement.
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith
Within a crime plot, Yasuko tries to protect her daughter. The article points to that protective effort as the novel’s route into motherhood, where care is tested by danger and the choices a parent makes under pressure.
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
Li’s book imagines conversations between a mother and her dead son. Its place in the list brings maternal grief into view not as a problem neatly resolved, but as an ongoing bond shaped by loss.
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- For pregnancy, gender and family: start with The Argonauts.
- For bodily transformation and the strain of daily care: try Nightbitch.
- For uncertainty about having children: choose Motherhood.
- For trans family-making and adoption: read Detransition, Baby.
- For public scrutiny around a child: consider Small Pleasures.
- For poverty and gendered sacrifice: turn to The Joys of Motherhood.
- For protection within a crime story: pick The Devotion of Suspect X.
- For maternal bereavement: read Where Reasons End.
Together, the books resist the idea that motherhood has one emotional register or one accepted route. Their subjects range from wanting a child to questioning that desire, from everyday demands to acute crisis, and from family formation to grief.
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