Features | April 28, 2025

Hoodwinked: Four Novels About Becoming a Mother 

Cynthia Miller Coffel 

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. Vintage, 2022, 256 pp., $17.00 (paperback). 

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. 37 Ink, 2022, 335 pp., $27.00 (hardcover).  

The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar. Vintage, 2023, 191 pp., $26.00 (hardcover). 

The Upstairs House by Julia Fine. Harper, 2021, 304 pp., $26.99 (hardcover). 

When my son was born thirty years ago, mothering friends recommended that I read Jane Lazarre’s 1976 memoir The Mother Knot. A description of a graduate-student wife raising two boys in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1960s, it was, to my knowledge, one of the earliest explorations of the upheaval and ambivalence experienced by a certain kind of smart, ambitious woman when she becomes a mother. Since then, many novels and memoirs have attempted to describe the dilemmas women face when they have children. Anne Lamott’s 1993 memoir Operating Instructions, Rachel Cusk’s 2001 A Life’s Work, and Elisa Albert’s 2015 novel After Birth are just a few works that explore with humor, frustration, and sometimes anger the physical, economic, and emotional challenges of pregnancy, childbirth, and early mothering.  

A new generation is writing about the transition to motherhood and finding innovative ways to describe the sometimes shocking, sometimes disappointing experience. Each of the four novels considered here—Nightbitch, The School for Good Mothers, The Nursery, and The Upstairs House—shows a smart young woman attempting to navigate major challenges brought on by motherhood, and each novel is, in some sense, a horror story. One novel uses magical realism to describe the main character’s experience, and another the tropes of science fiction; a third seems diary-like, while a fourth plays with the form of the novel, breaking up the plot with pieces of a fictional dissertation. Though the main characters of these novels—each of them quite privileged—are at different stages of mothering and have somewhat different concerns, each needs more of a community than she is provided with, and each is, in some way, contending with a sense that she has lost some part of herself. Together, these novels provide a nuanced, and distressing, perspective on what becoming a mother is like for educated middle-class women in the United States today.