A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts — and what it means to be fully human. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world's iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.

Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task — unrealizable, of course — to repair. Unless we recognize the role that we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and for the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.

Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers. (From Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Mothers is available in May 2018.