Listen to Your Mother

February 2, 2015
According to blogger Imig, Mother’s Day has been turned into another overly commercialized holiday. She thus launched, in 2010, a movement called Listen to Your Mother, which aims to return Mother’s Day to its original focus on mothers and motherhood, principally by gathering women to write stories and engage in live readings. The book of the same name gathers together 56 of those stories. Topics range from adoption to adolescence, from losing a spouse or a child to the most lighthearted aspects of parenting. The stories in the collection run the gamut, and the result is varied enough to ensure that readers who don’t identify with one tale will easily find resonance in another. Some will leave readers laughing out loud, while others will leave them crying. All of this collection’s stories, however, have one thing in common: readers will be left planning to call their mothers. Agent: Elizabeth Kaplan, Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency.

February 15, 2015
A collection of personal essays about the importance of connecting mothers to each other for support. Research points toward the myriad benefits for the children when a parent stays home while a spouse goes to work. Most parents look back on having had that opportunity as a blessing, a connection with their children that is worth more than anything. It's also true that, when it's happening, that blessed feeling is leavened with the insane conviction that you've worked nonstop all day and have nothing concrete to show for it. Enter the Internet and editor Imig. Five years ago, she was right in the thick of it, with two preschool-aged children and a husband frequently away on long trips for work. Imig began blogging about her life, which connected her to similarly minded women looking for comfort, advice and a way to laugh at it all. The author eventually started the Listen to Your Mother network, which has branched off into multiple websites, a live stage performance and this book. For a collection of writings with an ostensibly narrow focus, the range of material is impressive. A first grader collapses, and the medical tests offer no conclusions. A teenager, worried about becoming pregnant, finds an unexpected ally in her own mother, who says, "If you get pregnant, don't get married because then you're making two mistakes instead of one." Daughters that hate pink; a mother's rage at being left behind by a husband on deployment; tiny tots, their eyes aglow, eating the tiny slips of paper mother wrote her daily gratitude on-these and countless other experiences demonstrate the wide range of the ups and downs of parenting. The essays are short, which enables the book to cover a lot of ground, but they also pack a strong emotional punch-and they're almost certain to leave any mother feeling less alone.

February 1, 2015

Editor Imig expands upon the conversations about motherhood she has helped develop in the blogosphere and on social media via the performance movement Listen to Your Mother. This collection serves as a significant contribution to literature on and about motherhood because it breaks down the isolation that so often surrounds the topic. Imig has selected essays by writers whose identities as mothers or their interactions with such women reflect the diversity and complexity of the responsibility. There are stories from gay and lesbian families, military moms, widows, and even single dads discussing issues such as adoption, surrogacy, and disabilities. Unfortunately, a few essays suffer from an undercurrent of feminist misogyny. Amy Poehler's Yes Please mentions this phenomenon in a hilarious yet accurate way (e.g., she identifies how stay-at-home mothers and working mothers often say cruel things about one another's choices in the guise of compliments). Even though the material is funny, humor at the expense of different models of motherhood tears down the idea of community that a collection like this can and should generate. VERDICT Despite a few problems, these candid writings feel like a dinner date with a group of smart mothers who share their successes and failures with wit, fear, melancholy, playfulness, and all of the emotions that surround the reality of parenting. [See Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]--Emily Bowles, Building for Kids Children Museum, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2014

In 2010, Imig decided that Mother's Day needed to get beyond the Hallmark-bedecked focus on individual mothers and become a community-focused event. Thus she founded the live-reading series "Listen to Your Mother," which brought people together for a moment of sharing. Here she collects pieces from the series, which has expanded into a movement embracing dozens of cities.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.