World's Best Mother

World's Best Mother adds a uniquely European perspective to the literary canon on motherhood. Perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood.

“A slyly funny and strikingly astute meditation on love in all its guises by a self-proclaimed ‘amateur mother.’” —JENNY OFFILL, bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World’s Best Mother is a sublime journey—through pregnancy, the mothering of small children, marriage, an affair—which unfolds in a heady mix of anecdote, imagination, and social commentary. Clever and insightful, the narrator examines the myth, but also the scam, of motherhood, openly dialoguing with voices of the past that in one way or another have fueled her condition as a woman: from the legendary hominid Lucy—“the mother of humanity”—to Cinderella, passing through Plato, Mother Teresa, Darwin, Maupassant, and Simone de Beauvoir along the way. Humor, love, and horror converge in this lively auto-fictional battle between the intensity of child rearing and the writer trying to fight her way out.