16 Best Books About Mothers and Daughters, and Who Gets the Last Word

Michelle Zauner grew up in Oregon with a Korean mother whose love arrived as criticism and as food, mostly food. When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Zauner moves home, cooks for her, fails to save her, and afterwards keeps finding herself in the aisles of H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain, crying next to the banchan. The book moves between a difficult childhood, one brutal year of caregiving, and the odd comfort of learning to make jatjuk from a video because the person who knew the recipe is gone.

Four women meet in San Francisco to play mahjong, eat and tell stories. Their daughters, born in America, hear the stories as nagging. Tan builds the book so the mothers narrate their own chapters, which means you get the childhood in wartime China, the first marriage, the babies left behind, all the things sitting behind a piece of advice about a boyfriend. Then the daughters narrate theirs, and you watch the same conversation from the other end of the table, where it sounds like a completely different conversation.

Tara left her husband, took her small daughter to an ashram, spent a stretch on the streets of Pune, and never once behaved like the other mothers in the neighbourhood. Now Tara has dementia, and Antara, grown up and married and painting the same face over and over, has to look after her. The problem is that Antara's evidence is disappearing. The woman who did all of it can no longer confirm any of it. Doshi writes in cold short sentences that keep pulling you closer than is comfortable. It came out in India first as Girl in White Cotton.

Ida's mother Virmati has died, so Ida returns to Amritsar to piece her life together. What she finds is a young woman in the 1940s who wanted an education, fell in love with a married professor, and spent years being punished for both by a family with a different plan. Most of the novel sits inside Virmati's life rather than Ida's, so you meet the mother as a young woman making choices, not as the tired woman who later disapproved of everything. Partition arrives in the background and rearranges the lot of them.

Lucy is stuck in a New York hospital for nine weeks after a complication from surgery. Her mother, who she has not spoken to in years, arrives from Illinois and takes the chair at the end of the bed. For five days she talks about people from their small town, marriages that failed, who moved away. She does not mention the poverty they came from, or the truck, or what happened in that house. Strout writes it in short chapters and plain language, and the important conversation happens entirely in the gaps.

Kingston grew up in a California laundry listening to her mother Brave Orchid tell stories: an aunt back in China who was driven to a well, a woman warrior who trained in the mountains, ghosts who had to be fought. The book takes those stories, retells them, doubts them, and uses them to work out what a Chinese American girl in the 1960s is meant to do with a mother who is both terrifying and heroic. One chapter belongs to Brave Orchid's own years as a doctor in China, and it is the finest thing in the book.

Shalini is thirty, her mother has died, and she has no idea what to do with herself. Her memory keeps returning to Bashir Ahmed, a Kashmiri clothes seller who used to visit their Bangalore flat and tell stories, and around whom her mother came alive. So Shalini heads north to find him, arrives in a village with no understanding of what she is walking into, and starts making decisions whose consequences she will never have to live with. Her mother is on almost every page without appearing in a single present-day scene.

Sethe lives outside Cincinnati after the Civil War with her surviving daughter Denver and a ghost. Years earlier, when the slave catchers came, she did the thing the whole novel circles: she tried to kill her children rather than let them be carried back, and one of them died. Then a young woman calling herself Beloved turns up, and the household starts bending around her. Morrison gives Sethe her own reasoning at length and in her own words, which is the hardest possible version of the hearing this list keeps asking for.

Elena Richardson runs her life and her four children on rules that have always worked. Mia Warren, an artist, rents her spare house and lives by no rules at all, with her teenage daughter Pearl in tow. When a local couple adopts an abandoned Chinese American baby and the birth mother comes back to claim her, the neighbourhood splits, and Elena starts digging into Mia's past. Ng writes short chapters and moves through everyone's head, so you get four different definitions of a good mother, each one convinced of itself.

After her husband dies, Ma takes to her bed and stops facing the room, and everybody assumes this is the end. Instead she gets up as somebody else, moves in with her unmarried daughter Beti rather than her respectable son, makes a friend the family does not approve of, and eventually insists on crossing the border to a place she has not spoken about since 1947. Shree writes in a voice that wanders, jokes and lets crows and doors and roads have their say, and the translation carries all of it into English without flattening it.

After writing a book about her father, Bechdel spent years on this one about her mother, and the making of it sits inside the book. She draws their phone calls, her own therapy sessions, her dreams, and long stretches of Donald Winnicott, the analyst who wrote about good enough mothers. Her mother, a sharp woman who acted in local theatre and read everything, reads the drafts, comments and withholds. The result is a graphic memoir that is honest about a daughter drawing an entire book and still not getting the sentence she wanted.

Strayed was twenty two when her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and died within weeks. Four years later she had wrecked her marriage, was using heroin and had no plan, so she bought a rucksack she could barely lift and started walking the Pacific Crest Trail alone. The hiking chapters are funny about her own incompetence, the boots that destroy her feet, the food she cannot afford. The mother chapters are why the book exists: a young single mother who was cheerful in a way that embarrassed her daughter, and whose death removed the floor.

Ingrid Magnussen is a poet, beautiful, contemptuous of ordinary life and certain she is right about everything. When a man leaves her she kills him, and her daughter Astrid enters the Los Angeles care system at twelve. Each house offers Astrid a different model of what a woman can be, and each one gets tested against the letters arriving from prison, which are brilliant and cruel and built to make sure no other woman ever gets a grip on her daughter. Fitch writes Los Angeles heat and cheap apartments better than almost anyone.

Maya and her brother Bailey are put on a train as small children and sent to their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, while their parents get on with their lives in the cities. The book is about that town, that grandmother, the store, the church and the racism of the American South in the 1930s. It is also about Vivian Baxter, the mother who reappears in St Louis, glamorous and unreliable, and later in San Francisco as somebody who takes her daughter seriously at exactly the right moment. Angelou writes childhood without shrinking it.

Blythe grew up with a mother who left and a grandmother who was worse, so when her own daughter Violet arrives she watches herself for the signs. Then she starts watching Violet. The book alternates between Blythe's account of a marriage coming apart and short chapters about her mother and her grandmother, which is where it gets interesting: three women in a line, each convinced she is the exception. Audrain writes it as a domestic thriller, addressed throughout to the husband who stopped believing her.

Camille Preaker cuts words into her own skin and drinks to keep them quiet. Her editor sends her back to Wind Gap, the town she escaped, to report on two dead girls, which means her childhood bedroom and the constant attention of Adora, her mother, who runs the grandest house in town and the most careful performance of concern in it. Flynn keeps the story tight and mean, and the crime plot mostly exists to keep Camille in that house long enough for you to work out what kind of mothering went on there.