Here’s your first clue that you’ve begun a memoir of motherhood like no other. On page four, Sarah Hoover writes: “It was the simple unspeakable reality that from the moment he was born, this baby sometimes meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue in the antiquities section of an art museum.”
What follows is a complicated quest for the reason that Hoover felt so detached from her child and so unmoored in her marriage to a well-known artist.
She writes: “How dare I let myself be this miserable when I was so deeply fortunate?”
Hoover writes candidly about what she calls the “pernicious” myths that motherhood is the very essence of femininity and motherhood and re-examines her relationship with her own mother in
“The Motherload.”
Big Books and Bold Ideas asked two historians who’ve written about America’s past to reflect on America’s future and give us a broader view of where we are. They point to eras in our past that predict our present. They also discuss what they’ll be watching for as Trump returns to the Oval Office.
Alan Page did not think the title of "children’s book author" would be on his long resume after retiring from the Minnesota Supreme Court. But the NFL Hall of Famer’s fifth book, written with his daughter Kamie Page, highlights one of his most important jobs yet: being a grandfather.
Comedian Youngmi Mayer talks with NPR about how her Korean family uses humor as a tool for survival. She gets into the Korean comedic tradition and why the saddest stuff is what makes them laugh the hardest.
In “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old,” the actor discusses female aging and agency, and waking up from a surgery to learn the doctor made changes to her body that were unapproved.
Sometimes you finish a book and just have to talk about it with someone else. If your book club is looking for its next conversation-sparking title, NPR has a dozen for you!
