Photo Credit: Kamokila Cruddas

Guest post by Lily Diamond

Lily Diamond is a writer, editor, and plant whisperer. She lives on the farm where she grew up in Maui, Hawaiʻi, and is the author of two books and the creator of Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women, a virtual book club you should join.  

Nearly eighteen Mother’s Days ago, when I was twenty-four, my mom—my best friend, confidant, and champion—died of late-stage, late-diagnosed endometrial cancer. Grief came in unexpected waves: Sudden tears as I walked past a Clinique counter at the mall, catching the powdery scent of her makeup bag; the forced forgetting of my impulse to call and text her; the choking envy of seeing happy mothers and daughters in the wild. Holidays took the heaviest toll. And the weeks-long crush of Mother’s Day ads and celebrations yielded a nausea unlike any I’d known before. I wanted it all to disappear, or at least for someone to understand the pain.

Motherless daughters aren’t the only ones who shudder at the thought of Mother’s Day. The holiday can be complex for myriad reasons: estrangement, adoption, infertility, pregnancy and child loss, unfulfilled dreams of motherhood, family trauma, and more. When I picked up a copy of Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, I felt like I could exhale. There were other women out there who understood.

Over the years, books helped my heart suture, heal, and grow with insight and compassion, humor and distraction. Below, I’ve curated a collection of fiction and nonfiction that brings relief—for whatever you may be grieving.

Another relief? Being in community with women who get it. If you’re longing for more, join me at Lilith Lit: Women Reading Women, a virtual book club where you can go deep with titles you love and meet luminary authors from the comfort of your couch.

The 10 by E.A. Hanks

A mother’s life is cut short. A daughter goes on a cross-country road-trip seeking answers, following the 10 freeway from California to Florida. Interrogating family trauma, American identity, and the legacies of loss, Hanks weaves lyric travel writing with intimate memoir and shimmering fragments of poetry and prose from her mother’s journals.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

The Other Mother by Rachel Harper

This epic, Stonewall Book Award–winning novel delivers an intergenerational family mystery, social commentary, and personal revelation. Harper’s powerful characters and rich storytelling bring life to questions about love and belonging, leaving us wondering what makes a mother, what makes a family, and who gets to decide.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love by Laurel Braitman

Laurel Braitman knows life-shattering loss, and her memoir is a testament to survival shaped by grief. Through parental illness, death, wildfire, and the stumbling vulnerability of growing up, we discover a brilliant heart stitched through with love, strength, and the joy of new life.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

All the Mothers by Domenica Ruta

Welcome to the mommune, where three women find unexpected connection, catharsis, and family as they navigate a shared baby-daddy, mother-loss, and the social and financial stresses of single motherhood. Read if you’re in the mood to imagine a better future for women everywhere. One of our Lilith Lit picks for 2026.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Blue Nights: A Memoir by Joan Didion

An aching memoir about child loss by one of the American greats, Blue Nights recounts the days and months following the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo. As she grieves, Didion confronts and dissects haunting questions about parenting, care, aging, illness, and love.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

This dystopian novel about a future where mothering and identity are surveilled, regulated, and enforced by the government is an eviscerating take on the societal expectations heaped on women under patriarchy. A page-turning pressure cooker.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence by Rebecca Walker

Exploring complicated legacies of belief, identity, and devotion, Baby Love explores how the worldviews we inherit from our mothers define, limit, and liberate us. Walker’s clear-eyed exploration of the intersections of feminism and motherhood hit home. She’ll join Lilith Lit with her book Women Talk Money later this year.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame that Shape Women’s Lives by Jessica Zucker

Following her debut memoir I Had a Miscarriage, psychologist Jessica Zucker explores how shame and loss affect women in every phase of life—from girlhood, body image, and motherhood to reproductive choice, sexual trauma, menopause, and more.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

In this work of journalistic nonfiction that reads like a novel, Taddeo introduces us to three women in three towns across the U.S., each holding a unique and penetrating grief. Three Women reveals the electric intersections of desire, trauma, truth-telling, justice, and power that women live with daily. Join Lilith Lit to read in community and meet the author next month.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley

In the wake of a best friend and mentor’s suicide, Crosley deftly navigates the horrors and humors of grief with a relatable freshness. Though this memoir doesn’t explore parental or child loss, its generosity with the subject of grief itself feels like a hand to hold.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon