Motherhood as the epicenter of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed, so when, at 28, I realized my center was not there, I prodded the emptiness in my womb. Was I hollow, or was my center elsewhere? Are there others like me? Where are they? I had to find them.
My search started in books. But the books I found about childlessness were dense with numbers and technical terms, relied on melodramatic testimonies that made motherhood sound like the only thing worth living for, or supported antinatalist rhetoric on the verge of referring to children like the plague. The books I found were academic, dogmatic and radical. I had no use for any of them. Deep down, I knew that the fact that I couldn’t find anything helpful in those books meant something. Maybe I was looking for a book about a feeling. Maybe the question was not what childlessness was but who didn’t have children and how they felt. So, I looked for works by authors who are not mothers by choice, circumstance or ambivalence.
Ten years later, I wrote my own book on the topic. Part memoir, part exploration of childlessness through candid conversations, Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children is the story of fourteen women around the world, from different walks of life, who don’t have children. It’s also my story and the story of why I had to find them.
Tracing the spines of the books that line my shelves, I’ve plucked nine favorites by women who placed writing, not babies, at the center of their lives and flourished outside of motherhood. Here they are.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Motherhood by Sheila Heti is so foundational that discussions in women’s communities about the motherhood dilemma are split into before and after this book’s existence. There had been conversations, chapters, self-help guides and dissertations on this topic, but not an entire book, free of academic jargon, written in first person with such candor, originality, and depth. Heti dedicated almost three hundred pages to a lyrical meditation on whether or not to become a mother, inquiring tirelessly about the many aspects of the most consequential decision of adulthood. In doing so, she found a new language to express the modern woman’s possibilities outside the norms of femininity.
My copy of Motherhood has quotes highlighted on almost every page. One to remember: “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living – an insufficient love for the rest of us, we billions of orphans already living.”
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
These Precious Days is a collection of essays on home, family, friendship, and writing. About halfway through, in “There Are No Children Here,” Ann Patchett sets the record straight about her choice regarding parenthood: “The thing in my life that is most extraordinary is that I have always known what I have wanted to do… I have never wavered. I never wanted to get married, I never wanted children, I never wanted to be rich, I never wanted a big house… everything was designed for this one thing: I wanted to write.” And so she did. Nine novels, five nonfiction books, three children’s books and counting. Lucky us.
Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan
Mid-pandemic, Joy Sullivan left a relationship, a house, and a job. Then, she drove west, crossing the United States from Ohio to Oregon. Two years later, she published Instructions for Traveling West—over a hundred poems bound together in a beautiful debut that puts the reader in the passenger’s seat.
Sullivan’s poetry is translucent, sensual and sensorial, trapping us in the illusion that we are watching her life unfold from inches away. Yet, somehow, while intimate, reading her never feels intrusive. The verses in “Comments Section,” “Almonds,” “Burn,” “Queen,” and “Culpable” hint at her thoughts on Instagram followers, Uber drivers, and waitresses prying on her reproductive status and plans to procreate.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
A quirky, witty, and unpredictable novel that mirrors some aspects of the author’s life while telling the story of Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old Japanese woman who has been working in the same convenience store for eighteen years. Sayaka Murata is Japanese and worked part-time at the cash register for many years before quitting to devote herself to writing. Published in 2016, Convenience Store Woman is Murata’s 10th novel and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Wishing to depict how odd the people who believe they are normal are, and the social pressures of being a single woman in your 30s in her country, Murata gives voice to a workaholic female protagonist who chose to never have sex, get married, or have kids. She is aware that her ways are perceived as socially awkward and a source of constant worry to her family, but she doesn’t seem bothered by any of it. Keiko doesn’t want to fit in. She knows what makes her happy, and she’s not going to let anyone take her away from her convenience store.
Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan
By uncovering seven plastic boxes of family memorabilia in the corner of her office, Amy Tan goes deep into her traumatic childhood, reflects on her Chinese heritage, and offers insights into the nature of creativity and her writing methods. Where the Past Begins is a poignant and humorous memoir that recounts Tan’s complex relationship with her mentally ill mother, the loss of both her 16-year-old brother and her father within months of each other, and examines her love for art, music, and linguistics.
Old letters to and from her mother, some dating from 1969, when Tan went to college and they separated for the first time, give further insight into a relationship marked by frequent emotional fights and declarations of love. Sunk deep into the material evidence of their mother-daughter bond, Tan shares her feelings about becoming a mother herself, expressing no desire to pass along her genetic structure by stating, “What’s in me that I’d have wanted to pass on is already in the books.”
Notes to Self by Emilie Pine
These are six bold essays from Irish author Emilie Pine about growing up with an alcoholic father, the heartbreak of dealing with infertility issues, feminism, sexual violence, and depression. All six are worth reading, but the fourth one stands out. In “Notes on Bleeding & Other Crimes,” Pine spills all across the page: “this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood […] a shocking red to fill the white.” Notes to Self is vivid and visceral, reflecting vital aspects of life as a woman today.
Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key
Is it possible that life without romantic love is not so bad? In her first nonfiction work, British poet Amy Key pays tribute to Joni Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue, which she considers the basis for her view on romantic love. Chapter by chapter, Key dissects her life and the album while creating parallels between the two and asking big questions about an unplanned singlehood.
Her nuanced narrative makes space for confessions of shame, jealousy, and regret as she wonders about the parts of adulthood she would miss, such as motherhood, if she were to continue to be the sole curator of her life. From redefining “a family home” to building a house shaped by her needs and appreciating time alone or with friends, she gives us full access to what her days look and feel like as she finds fulfilment in other iterations of love.
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up walks us through how Bernardine Evaristo came to be the first Black woman and Black British person to win the Booker Prize, receive over 80 awards, nominations, fellowships, and honours, and have her books named the Book of the Year over sixty times.
Delving into her English, Nigerian, Irish, German and Brazilian heritage, romantic relationships, personal development and activism, Evaristo outlines her trajectory over six decades. Her ninth book also offers glimpses of her decision not to have children. “Instead of becoming a mother, I became an aunt and godmother, roles I’ve loved. I also describe myself as child-free, as opposed to childless, which implies a failure to fulfil my role as a woman rather than an active choice not to have them.”
Paradise, Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock
Published in 1998, this is the book in which the former president emerita of the Poetry Society of America, Molly Peacock, tells the story of her dysfunctional childhood, her decision not to have children and her search for purpose and joy through creativity. This is also the book I found in 2013 at the Malmö library and returned only after shipping a copy from the United States to Sweden. This is the book I carried on trains and planes as if it were my emotional support animal. And the reason why, eight years later, I contacted Molly and told her that I too was writing a book about my choice not to have kids and that I needed a mentor. She said yes and guided me through the dark patches. When I finished writing Others Like Me, I dedicated it to her: the author of the first book that helped me visualize the life of an older woman without children.