Books
The Good Mother Myth
Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.
When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?
This timely and thought-provoking book will make you laugh, cry, and want to scream (sometimes all at once). Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.
"Most moms know that the myth of ideal motherhood is just that: a myth. Nancy Reddy charts her own disillusionment with the ideal while also illuminating the making and the makers of the myth: white men in power. Generous, raw, and meticulously researched, The Good Mother Myth will validate you and set you free."
— Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced
"Reddy cracks open everything we take for granted about motherhood and shows us the facts are mere mythology and the 'science' is shoddy. This book is a gift to all mothers. With beautiful prose, Reddy wipes the slate clean and gives moms permission to forge their own parenting path."
— Minna Dubin, author of Mom Rage
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Pocket Universe
“A tender and expansive poetry collection on new motherhood”
— Colorado Review
“Nancy Reddy’s Pocket Universe is a wildly powerful and searingly honest meditation on the ways in which anxiety and wonder intersect at the nexus of motherhood. These poems unsparingly and vividly chronicle the speaker’s corporeal postpartum experiences, while simultaneously reaching backwards into history and outwards into space—invoking everything from Insta-mommies to Pliny the Elder to Queen Victoria to celestial light—to remind us of our fragility and resilience in the face of all of the dangers caregiving in the world engenders.”
— Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk
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The Long Devotion:
Poets Writing Motherhood
with co-editor with Emily Pérez
“A necessary text for every mother laboring to make space for her writing in this world.”
— Katherine Indermaur, Colorado Review
“For many mothers, writing isn’t optional; it’s essential. As Khadijah Queen writes in ‘Mothering Solo,’ ‘Being a mother often makes the act of writing even more urgent, more sanity-saving, more necessary.’ The Long Devotion is an encouragement to mother writers everywhere that their experiences matter.”
— Crystal Rowe, Literary Mama
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Double Jinx
Winner of the National Poetry Series
“Channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Nancy Reddy is a live wire who uses a knife-tip focus and intellect to filigree, with raw exactitude, issues of femininity and the domestic. Reddy’s range—the familial, fairy tale, myth and theology, popular culture—allow her poems to unravel and embody the seething mystery, the metamorphosis, the often inherent violence in womanhood… . Palpable with disquiet, the absolute clarity of these poems will haunt the reader. Double Jinx is a brilliant first book, profound and fierce.”
— Alex Lemon
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Acadiana
Black River Chapbook Competition Winner
“The poems in Nancy Reddy’s Acadiana explore the disaster-ravaged Louisiana landscape that exists in ‘the space of / after.’ Ranging in location from the bayous to the levees to the I-10 expressway that cuts through the state, Reddy’s poems meditate on the wreckage of the Gulf Coast and give us its story through the voices of women. How do we live now, she asks in the poem ‘The Thibodeaux Girl Speaks, After,’ ‘with levees and spillways that hold the river / to its shores, with water / rising yearly in the gulf’? Reddy’s poems reckon with these large questions with eloquence and urgency.”
— Nicole Cooley, author of Resurrection,
The Afflicted Girls, and Breach