Monthly Reading Review: May 2025

Recommended books and articles from the past month.

Dear friends,

I am delighted to share my next Monthly Reading Review, covering the best books and articles I’ve read over the past month. Scroll down to read my review of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson — plus some must-read articles from writers I love!

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson

Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a masterclass in one of my favorite types of books. Blending literary analysis with personal reflection, it reframes literature as a prism for understanding motherhood and the “characters” mothers are — or rather, the ones we are conditioned to be. Summoning everyone from Audre Lorde to Ralph Waldo Emerson to William Shakespeare, Lipson examines the pressure we feel to “fictionalize” our bodies through veneers, acrylic nails, and hair extensions alongside a simultaneous pressure to minimize and reject the feminine, reflecting a type of misogyny that has been “absorbed and turned inward.” Caught in this nebulous in-between, Lipson goes on to interrogate the effects of feminine desire — is it generative or destabilizing? — together with taboos around female friendship and our inability to reconcile motherhood with intellect.

Ultimately and “fundamentally,” Lipson proves that mothering is “an undertaking of the mind” that we must reimagine as we go. Sometimes, the enemy is the outside world or “a future we can’t catch up to”; and sometimes, the enemy is ourselves. As she bares her soul, Lipson asks how we can really know our children or — perhaps even more poignantly — the mothers who have come before us. Our childhoods, Lipson tells us, are like books we “reread again and again, each time seeing things differently,” where it is not so easy to differentiate “the angel from the witch” or “the goddess from the monster.”

In a world where motherhood is still reduced to oversimplified and tired tropes, Lipson offers us a gripping, sensitive, and courageous love letter to nuance. No matter where we are on our own motherhood journey, she empowers us to embrace the richness of the experience and also ourselves.

While Nicole isn’t on Substack (yet!), she has a really great newsletter called “Thinkers Who Mother,” which you can subscribe to on her website here!

Must-Read Articles

• Dolly Parton’s Quitely Inspiring Defense of Marriage by Casey Cep (The New Yorker)

• The Surprising Way Siblings Shape Our Lives by

  Susan Dominus
  (The New York Times Magazine)

• In Praise of Jane Austen’s Least Beloved Novel by

  Adelle Waldman
  (The New Yorker)

• The Treasure of Democracy That Madeleine L’Engle Discovered in America’s National Parks by Abigail Santamaria (The Boston Globe)

• Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack by Peter C. Baker (The New Yorker)

• A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12 by Jessica Grose (The New York Times)

• There’s No Place Like the Vermont Country Store Catalog by

  Erika Veurink
  (The Strategist)

Must-Read Articles on Substack

• The Lead-Up to Litha by

  Everything Looks Rosie
  (Sow, Grow, Harvest, Rest)

• The Real Case for Paying for “Unpaid Labor” by

  Stephanie H. Murray
  (Family Stuff)

• Why Feminism and Motherhood Still Feel Irreconcilable by

  Elissa Strauss
  (Made with Care)

• I’m Disappointed in Me Too by

  Susan Cain
  (The Quiet Life)

• Endings, Beginnings, and Dwelling in Possibility by

  Suleika Jaouad
  (The Isolation Journals)

Happy reading!

Your friend and fellow traveler,

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