Listen to Your Mother

Listen to Your Mother is a collection of honest and powerful essays celebrating motherhood. In 2010, Ann Imig decided Mother’s Day was lacking—that instead of being solely a commercialized retail-driven holiday, the focus should be on family. By bringing our community together to share personal stories about our mothers, we could get back to the core of why mothering is important. That year, she organized a live reading, and Listen to Your Mother was born. Now it’s a rapidly growing movement that’s sweeping the nation. Like the live readings, the Listen to Your Mother anthology is a brutally honest look at modern motherhood, showcasing the experiences of ordinary people of different races, genders, and ages, taking readers on a journey through motherhood in all of its complexity, diversity, and humor. With pathos and candor that is stimulating and fresh, these contributors share stories about their experiences with adoption, assimilation, and emptying nests; first-time motherhood, foster-parenting, and infertility; LGBTQ parenting, special-needs parenting, and surrogacy; stepmothering, never mothering, and mothering through illness. These essays are devastatingly funny, refreshingly edgy, and deeply thought-provoking—they are the collective voice of mothers among us. Whether you are a mother, have one, or know one, Listen to Your Mother is an emotional whirlwind that is guaranteed to entertain, amuse, and enlighten.