Whether you’re looking for a mother-daughter story to warm your heart or wreck your emotions, this short list is sure to have what you need. From memoir to sports, travel tale to folklore, you’re sure to find something that strikes your fancy, and maybe your mother’s as well. Maybe your daughter’s too!
You might remember the name Leslie Jamison from her other works of nonfiction, like The Empathy Exams and XX but this is her first memoir. Here, she explores the nature of her relationship with her own daughter, which borders controlling if not pathological; she examines the mararige of her own parents, which seems to have informed how her own romantic relationships manifest. In vignettes, she tries to make sense of how romantic failures affect her relationship with her daughter as well.
Ella Fitchburg and her boyfriend Jude are consumed by their teenage love… that is, until Ella is accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, a superior court judge… and then convicted. Not long after receiving her prison sentence, she learns that she’s pregnant. All things considered, she decides it’s best to relinquish her child. When she’s discharged from prison just six years later, Ella wants to start a new life, but her old one keeps dragging her back, and she can’t just let her child go. She follows the clues to find her daughter, and she hides her identity as she tries to uncover the truth of what happened to ruin her life.
This heartwarming novel follows a mother and daughter as they vacation to Paris. Though the mother is a glamorous perfectionist, the daughter prefers to travel out of an old beige duffel bag. Their trip together runs the span of emotions from laughing to crying.
Thriller writer James Patterson and famous sportswriter Mike Lupica team up to bring you a suspenseful tale of a pair of mother-daughter champions. Though Maggie and Becky are both star horseback riders, they’ve promised to never compete with each other. But when they both qualify to compete in the Paris Olympics, everything changes.
Twelve years ago, thirteen-year-old middle child Ruthy Ramirez disappeared after track practice. Now, as the elder sister Jessica watches a reality show called Catfight, she’s positive the woman on screen is her lost sister. She recognizes the birthmark under her eye. Jessica calls their younger sister, Nina, to corroborate. With this bit of hope, the Ramirez women start to reframe the other various things that have gone wrong in their lives—after all, losing a child or sister is no easy thing to grieve.
This novel blends folktale and myth into a narrative of three generations of love affairs among Chinese women. To begin with, in 1917, just before the Chinese Revolution, Yunhong is engaged to marry her beloved, wealthy landlord’s son… until her brother sabotages the marriage and changes the shape of their family forever. Her daughter never knows her father, and she passes that trauma on to her own daughters as they navigate the years following Mao’s death and life in America.
Mary Kay McBrayer is the author of America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. You can find her short works at Oxford American, Narratively, Mental Floss, and FANGORIA, among other publications. She hosts the podcast about women in true crime, The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. Follow Mary Kay McBrayer on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her author site here.
