Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose ’04 (Mariner Books)

If you’re feeling like a bad mother, overwhelmed by guilt and everyone else’s expectations of what motherhood should be—it’s not your fault. That’s because, as Grose writes in this fierce, witty, and companionable book, our society, with its minimal and often leaky...

Struggle and Solidarity: Seven Stories of How Americans Fought for Their Mental Health Through Federal Legislation edited by Michael Compton and Marc Manseau ’02, ’06 MPH (American Psychiatric Association Publishing)

Helpful origin stories of seven pieces of federal legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, that all...

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv ’04 (Picador)

With moving, sometimes haunting prose Aviv, a New Yorker staff writer, deftly hikes into the hinterlands of psychiatry, looking at how the narratives attached to a diagnosis can shape a person’s sense of self. This nuanced, deeply researched debut centers on case studies...

The Daughter Ship by Boo Trundle ’89 (Pantheon)

In this debut you’ll meet Katherine Burns, who lives in the suburbs with her teenagers, Emily and Zack, and her largely absent husband, Phil. Katherine is circling the edge after growing up in a deeply dysfunctional family. She’s also fighting for narrative space with three warring inner voices—Truitt, Smooshed...

American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration by Benjamin Weber ’08 MAT (The New Press)

Weber, a University of California Davis professor of African American studies, does a convincing job of confronting and considering our history of incarceration and how that has played a role in the expansion of American power. He details the...

Speak Up: Breaking the Glass Ceiling at CBS News by Linda Mason ’64 (Rowan & Littlefield)

Plenty of newsroom firsts in this memoir as Mason, who worked at CBS for 47 years, details her climb from a CBS Radio desk assistant in 1966 to being the first woman producer for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and finally...

Pete and Alice in Maine by Caitlin Shetterly ’97 (Harper Collins)

It’s 2020 and Alice and Pete flee Manhattan with their young daughters, Iris and Sophie, escaping to their oceanfront second home near Blue Hill. For Alice, whose writerly hopes have been flattened by parenting, this seems a safe course. Pete, who toils in finance and has...

The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman ’11 (Tin House)

Eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm survived a near drowning, but it left her in an odd coma where as the years pass she does not age. Then Maeve’s mom, Naomi, a researcher for a biotech company that is bent on releasing a cure for aging, drowns. Her death...

Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay by Kelly McWilliams ’10 (Little Brown for Young Readers)

Harriet Douglass is a Black Louisiana high school senior living on a former sugarcane plantation that her parents have turned into a museum highlighting the stories of the families who were enslaved there. Harriet has been a Westwood tour guide since she...