Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty

“A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality.” —The New York Times

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.

Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice.

Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.

“Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose’s intellectual range is dazzling.” —The Economist

“[Rose’s] book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop “tearing mothers and the world to pieces.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts