Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself

TikTokker Ward, who’s known for her unvarnished parenting videos, debuts with an earnest if uneven memoir of her hard-knock early life and years as a young mother. Though Ward’s core insight that “motherhood is hard” is obvious, she manages surprising depth elsewhere. Her account of her difficult childhood with a loving but immature mother is shot through with arresting dark humor (“I could cook, clean, and fend off creditors like nobody’s business”), and chapters charting her rise to social media fame during the Covid pandemic capture both the rush of finding new community and the disorientation of sudden viral celebrity. Ward’s prose, though charmingly conversational, wobbles in places, with tangled metaphors obscuring her meaning (parents who lack a supportive network, or “intergenerational village quilt,” must “go fabric shopping and make our own.... Sometimes, our scraps of material were scattered around the globe or hidden under giant boulders in some kind of sick scavenger hunt”). Yet there’s energy in these pages, and an unmistakable sense that Ward operates from a genuine desire to make other young mothers struggling with shame or buried trauma feel less alone. The result, while familiar, is ardent and heartfelt. Agent: Veronica Goldstein, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)