Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now

According to blogger Imig, Mother’s Day has been turned into another overly commercialized holiday. She thus launched, in 2010, a movement called Listen to Your Mother, which aims to return Mother’s Day to its original focus on mothers and motherhood, principally by gathering women to write stories and engage in live readings. The book of the same name gathers together 56 of those stories. Topics range from adoption to adolescence, from losing a spouse or a child to the most lighthearted aspects of parenting. The stories in the collection run the gamut, and the result is varied enough to ensure that readers who don’t identify with one tale will easily find resonance in another. Some will leave readers laughing out loud, while others will leave them crying. All of this collection’s stories, however, have one thing in common: readers will be left planning to call their mothers. Agent: Elizabeth Kaplan, Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency. (Apr.)