Listen to Your Mother What She Said Then What Were Saying Now

Irreverent, thought-provoking, hilarious, and edgy: a collection of personal stories celebrating motherhood, featuring #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jenny Lawson and Jennifer Weiner, and many other notable writers.   Listen to Your Mother is a fantastic awakening of why our mothers are important, taking readers on a journey through motherhood in all of its complexity, diversity, and humor. Based on the sensational national performance movement, Listen to Your Mother showcases the experiences of ordinary people of all racial, gender, and age backgrounds, from every corner of the country. This collection of essays celebrates and validates what it means to be a mother today, with honesty and candor that is arrestingly stimulating and refreshing. The stories are raw, honest, poignant, and sometimes raunchy, ranging from adoption, assimilation to emptying nests; first-time motherhood, foster-parenting, to infertility; single-parenting, LGBTQ parenting, to special-needs parenting; step-mothering; never mothering, to surrogacy; and mothering through illness to mothering through unsolicited advice. Honest, funny, and heart-wrenching, these personal stories are the collective voice of mothers among us. Whether you are one, have one, or know one, Listen to Your Mother is an emotional whirlwind that is guaranteed to entertain, amuse, and enlighten.  

Praise for Listen to Your Mother

“With their authentic glimpses into this hard, beautiful thing we call life, the essays between these covers led me to fresh perspectives on mothering and being mothered. I savored the open vulnerability that met me with each turn of the page. From the hilarious to the profound, and not bound by gender or geography, these stories generously plumbed the depths of all that is motherhood.” —Anna Whiston Donaldson, New York Times-bestselling author of Rare Bird   “Ive been a longtime fan of Anns Listen to Your Mother movement, and I just adore this collection. The stories are diverse, yet bound together by Listen to Your Mothers trademark rawness and honesty. A perfect gift for any woman in your life . . . or yourself!” —Jill Smokler, New York Times-bestselling author of Confessions of a Scary Mommy   “Listen to Your Mother manages to do what few anthologies do: it makes us see ourselves clearly through the eyes of many different writers—all gifted and many wickedly funny. These writers voice the things that everyone thinks and no one says. Long live the mothers!” —Suzanne Finnamore, award-winning author of Split  

A collection of essays celebrating motherhood—what our mothers said then, what they're saying now.   Based on the sensational national performance movement, Listen to Your Mother is an anthology of personal stories about mothers—being one, having one, losing one, and everything in between. In the tradition of Bitch in the House, these essays celebrate and validate what it means to be a mother today. These contributors offer personal stories on topics that range from adoption, assimilation, emptying nests, first-time motherhood, never-motherhood, foster-parenting, infertility, loss, rock-and-roll parenting, single-parenting, LGBTQ parenting, special-needs parenting, step-mothering, surrogacy, mothering through illness, mothering through unsolicited advice—all with wit and humor, in prose as poetic and powerful as it is honest and frank. Their stories go straight to the heart of motherhood.  

Ann Imig is the founder of the live-reading series Listen to Your Mother, which is a rapidly growing national movement with shows in dozens of cities. She writes the blog Anns Rants, which was named to Babble's Top 100 Mom Blogs and Top 50 Twitter Moms, and was honored as a Voice of the Year from 2010-2013 by BlogHer. Ann lives with her husband and children in Madison, Wisconsin.