Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Heavy Cream, a novel about a teenage girl finding mother figures in unconventional places. It’s out tomorrow from Simon & Schuster. Below, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright recommends four books that complicate motherhood. Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou Maya Angelou’s mother, Vivian Baxter, sent Maya and her brother away as very young children to live with their paternal grandmother in Arkansas. When Maya returned to her mother years later, she regarded her less as a mother than as a beautiful, formidable stranger. Baxter, miraculously, does not demand to reclaim the title. Instead, she sets about earning her place in her daughter’s life. The story is unusual in tellings of maternal abandonment. The relationship is not repaired by revisiting the original wound, but by what Vivian Baxter does afterward. She is bold, glamorous, unconventional, and fiercely protective. If she has not been present in the lead-up, she repeatedly shows up for her daughter as she forges her way into adulthood. The woman who gave Maya away as a child is …

Every second Sunday in May, various countries celebrate mothers with heartfelt greeting cards, cheery bouquets, and coveted restaurant reservations. Motherhood—in real life, fictional, and nonfictional—looms so large, it clamors for an official celebration, but 24 hours seems like a mere snippet of time for a figure of such importance to so many. A peek at the TBR titles on my book cart sings of my fascination with the subject of mothers—there’s All the Mothers by Domenica Ruta, The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich, and mother by m.s. RedCherries. In every reading nook: Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. And high on my to-buy list, So We Can Know, edited by Aracelis Girmay. Recently, I started the much-acclaimed memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. From the first page, it describes the influence of Arundhati Roy’s mother with searing clarity: “taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself.” When it comes to mothers, a myriad of experiences exist, which call for …

Every second Sunday in May, various countries celebrate mothers with heartfelt greeting cards, cheery bouquets, and coveted restaurant reservations. Motherhood—in real life, fictional, and nonfictional—looms so large, it clamors for an official celebration, but 24 hours seems like a mere snippet of time for a figure of such importance to so many. A peek at the TBR titles on my book cart sings of my fascination with the subject of mothers—there’s All the Mothers by Domenica Ruta, The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich, and mother by m.s. RedCherries. In every reading nook: Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. And high on my to-buy list, So We Can Know, edited by Aracelis Girmay. Recently, I started the much-acclaimed memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. From the first page, it describes the influence of Arundhati Roy’s mother with searing clarity: “taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself.” When it comes to mothers, a myriad of experiences exist, which call for …