Mommy Lit

The genre of mommy lit became a popular phenomenon in 2002 with the publication of Allison Pearson's novel I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, which sparked a publishing boom in this type of literature. Protagonists in these texts deal with conception, pregnancy, birth, and the early days of motherhood. Mommy lit gives a voice to socially unacceptable feelings and thoughts which many new mothers experience, such as ambivalence about taking on the responsibilities of motherhood, anxieties about the consequence for their career, and feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt as they try to juggle conflicting roles and are unable to do any of them perfectly. But it is also an escapist genre in which the laws of probability are suspended ...