The journalist’s One Bad Mother examines “bad mom” archetypes in pop culture, from stage moms to trad wives and MILFs.

Why did you want to write about bad mothers?

I think when you become a parent, it just becomes really evident right away that there are all these boxes that society puts women, particularly mothers, into. I liken it to this game that my son plays on Roblox. It’s this twisty slide, and you just climb the slide forever, and you don’t really get to an endpoint. That’s kind of what motherhood is like in this country. You’re trying to achieve this ideal and this standard, and you keep climbing with no endpoint in sight. I wanted people to be frustrated by that. I decided, okay, how can I analyze and deconstruct these tropes through history and pop culture? Also, I just really wanted to write an essay on MILFs.

How did you choose the bad moms featured in the book?

There are so many that I love—well, love is not quite the right word, but there are so many that I find interesting. Some of them were from movies and TV shows that I love and just kind of wanted an excuse to write about, like Gypsy. As soon as I saw the revival with Audra McDonald and I heard my mother say, “I don’t think Mama Rose is a bad mom,” I was like, okay, this needs to be in the stage mom chapter.

How did you juggle trying to understand bad mothers while not defending them?

This is not some sort of contrarian “well, actually, in a wild twist, the person you thought was bad isn’t bad after all.” It wasn’t about defending them, ever. It was about understanding them, understanding the systems that created them, understanding what made them the way they are. What makes a bad mother? And what are the factors that contribute to a woman being labeled a bad mother, or being perceived as a bad mother? How can we better understand them so they can become better mothers? That’s ultimately the project.

What stood out to you while writing the book?

The idea of the bad mother is a relatively new creation historically. The bad mother wasn’t even a concept until 150 years ago. Mothers were not judged based on how good they were at parenting or nurturing. That wasn’t the concept then. It was, Do you keep your kids alive? It’s not an innate concept to humanity, that a woman can be a bad mother. It’s something that is very much recent and, in some cases, culturally constructed.