Mother’s Day often celebrates the idealised maternal bond—flowers, gratitude, and the mythology of unconditional love. But for many women, the relationship with their mothers is more complex, layered with silence, misunderstanding, longing, and unspoken grace. Literature, especially by women writers, offers us not simplifications, but truths.
This feature highlights ten extraordinary authors——who have dared to explore difficult mother–daughter relationships through memoir, fiction, poetry, and hybrid narratives. These are not always stories of reconciliation. Some are about rupture. Others are about surviving rupture.
1. Maya Angelou & Vivian Baxter: The Long Road Back
Maya Angelou’s early separation from her mother, Vivian Baxter, led to a strained relationship. However, in her memoir Mom & Me & Mom (2013), Angelou recounts their eventual reconciliation:
“On the day we moved from her house, Mother liberated me by letting me know she was on my side. I realized that I had grown close to her and that she had liberated me. She liberated me from a society that would have had me think of myself as the lower of the low. She liberated me to life. And from that time to this time, I have taken life by the lapels and I have said, ‘I’m with you, kid.’”
—Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom
This liberation marked a turning point, allowing Angelou to embrace her identity and strength.
2. Jeanette Winterson & Mrs Winterson: Love in Exile
Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, was a strict Pentecostal who often expressed her disapproval. In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), Winterson recalls:
“When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’”
—Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Despite the harshness, Winterson reflects on the complexities of their relationship, acknowledging the challenges and the resilience it fostered in her.
3. Jamaica Kincaid: The Legacy of Maternal Silence
In The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Jamaica Kincaid explores the absence of her mother, who died during childbirth, and the impact of this loss:
“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.”
—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
This profound absence shaped Kincaid’s understanding of identity and womanhood, highlighting the enduring influence of maternal relationships.
4. Sylvia Plath & Aurelia Plath: The Mirror and the Crime
Sylvia Plath’s correspondence with her mother, Aurelia, reveals the complexities of their bond. In Letters Home (1975), Plath writes:
“I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living—a set of values.”
—Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
This introspection underscores Plath’s quest for identity amidst the expectations and pressures of her maternal relationship.
5. Virginia Woolf: A Mother Remembered as Absence
Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, passed away when Woolf was 13, leaving a lasting void. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf reflects:
“I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but I cannot describe the stream.”
—Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past
This absence profoundly influenced Woolf’s writing, permeating her narratives with themes of loss and memory.
6. Edwidge Danticat – Breath, Eyes, Memory
In her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat delves into the intergenerational trauma between mothers and daughters. The protagonist, Sophie, grapples with the legacy of her mother Martine’s experiences, including the traumatic practice of “testing” for virginity. This ritual, passed down from mother to daughter, becomes a symbol of control and inherited pain.
“There is a place where women live in the red. It’s the place where they go to be mothers, where they go to be daughters, where they go to be sisters. It’s the place where they go to be women.”
—Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Danticat’s narrative explores how cultural traditions can perpetuate cycles of trauma, and how confronting these practices is essential for healing and self-discovery.
7. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele (2017) is a letter to a friend on how to raise a feminist daughter. Adichie emphasizes the importance of empowering girls to question societal norms and to value themselves equally.
“Teach her that the idea of ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.”
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele
Through this manifesto, Adichie provides guidance on nurturing independent and confident daughters who can navigate and challenge patriarchal structures.
8. Rita Dove – Mother Love
In her poetry collection Mother Love (1995), former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove reimagines the myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore the complexities of the mother–daughter bond. The poems delve into themes of separation, longing, and the cyclical nature of love and loss.
“I lost my mother in the myth of her. I am the mother now.”
—Rita Dove, Mother Love
Dove’s work captures the enduring impact of maternal relationships and the ways in which daughters carry forward their mothers’ legacies.
9. Buchi Emecheta – The Joys of Motherhood
Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979) challenges traditional notions of motherhood through the story of Nnu Ego, a woman whose identity is deeply tied to her role as a mother. The novel critiques societal expectations and the sacrifices women make in the name of motherhood.
“She had been a good mother, and yet her children had all left her. She had given them life, and they had taken it and gone away.”
—Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood
Emecheta’s narrative highlights the often unacknowledged struggles of mothers and questions the true rewards of motherhood.
These ten writers do not offer easy resolutions. What they offer is more difficult, and more valuable: a language for grief, rage, silence—and sometimes, survival. Whether in the form of withheld tenderness, inherited trauma, cultural duty, or absence, each of these daughters confronted the mother as both myth and woman. In doing so, they made space for something braver than reconciliation: understanding without illusions, and love—when it came—as a choice.
