Nancy Reddy: On the Myth of Perfect Parenting
Nancy Reddy’s previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches writing at Stockton University and writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.
Photo by Little Blue Canoe Photography LLC
In this interview, Nancy discusses how allowing herself to draft imperfectly reflects the argument in her new book, The Good Mother Myth, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Nancy Reddy
Literary agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to be a Good Mom
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Release date: January 21, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: Pocket Universe (poetry collection, LSU 2022), Double Jinx (poetry collection, Milkweed 2015), The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (anthology, UGA 2022)
Elevator pitch: The Good Mother Myth is half memoir, half research, and it investigates the midcentury science and psychology and animal studies beneath our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. If you love your actual kids but suspect that being a mom is kind of a scam, it’s the book for you.
Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]
What prompted you to write this book?
When I started working on this book, my kids were 3 and 5, and I kind of came up out of the haze of early motherhood and looked around and thought, What just happened to me? My whole life I’d been good at things, and I’d really believed that I could do just about anything with hard work and the right research—and becoming a mother turned that belief on its head. There was no amount of work or studying that made me feel like I was doing it right. So, this book became a long investigation, first of why motherhood was so hard, and eventually, of that underlying belief that motherhood was something you could master.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I started working on this book in the summer of 2018. My older son, who’d just finished kindergarten as I began, will be well into his first year of middle school by publication. So, the research and writing and thinking in this book really spanned my kids’ entire elementary school years. (Plus, a pandemic and the publication of two other books, my poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I think of as cousins to this new book.)
The book evolved a ton in that time, as you’d guess. I started out, I can see now, trying to write a sort of theory of everything for motherhood. I wanted to figure out why this thing that I’d assumed would be natural and easy and beautiful had in fact been incredibly hard and ugly at times, even as it was joyous and transformative. I read every motherhood memoir I could get my hands on, and then my research brain kicked into gear, and I started reading about animal parenting and anthropology of childhood and the neurohormonal roots of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders. It was fascinating, but as a concept for a book, it was way too big. I honed the project on my own for quite a while, and when I signed with my agent, we worked for another nine months to clarify the concept and the structure. In the end, the book focuses on our bad ideas about motherhood and unpacks the midcentury origins of those ideas as a way into having a more humane and loving experience of mothering.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The biggest thing for me was having an editor who was really excited about this book and eager to help me shape it. Once we sold the book, the actual turnaround for finishing it was tight (less than eight months I think?), so I had to quickly get comfortable sending my editor work that wasn’t as polished as I would have wanted. It felt really vulnerable to send those early messy drafts, but writing that way also helped me be freer and less precious. It’s a looser and funnier and warmer book than it would be if I’d had the time to really try to make it perfect. (Which feels, I can see now, like the writing echo of what the book argues about motherhood: that perfect or good shouldn’t be our desired endpoint anyway!)
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
When the book sold, I felt really confident about the structure and the research and the arc of it, but as I was rereading some of my central sources, I found that there was still one last twist. I’d been writing mostly about the work of male scientists who’d devoted their careers to telling women how to mother, but at one point, I realized—most of them had kids. Who was raising them while they were in their labs and traveling the world lecturing women? (You can guess the answer.) Once I turned my attention to the wives of those scientists, I discovered that they were fascinating characters, too. Harry Harlow, the psychologist whose research on infant monkeys was foundational for attachment theory, had been married twice, and each time, his wife was forced, because of university nepotism policies, to leave her career. And the point isn’t just that for these two brilliant, ambitious women, their career was the cost of marriage—it’s also that the science is worse for having edged women out of the lab. I came to feel a real kinship with the wives, who were complex characters of their own, and whose stories, because they hadn’t left such a visible paper trail, were much harder to track down.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
When we talk about being a “good mom,” it’s almost never about what moms and kids and families actually need. Being a “good mom” always seems to be more about performing whatever shifting, impossible ideal for someone else—the other moms at daycare drop-off, your own mom, the specter of the online mamasphere. Your kids don’t need an adorable bento box lunch or an Instagrammable bedroom or a million extracurriculars to hone their skills. They just need love and attention from responsive adults who care about them. (And those adults don’t always have to be the mom! More loving adults is always more.) I hope that readers will be able to stop worrying about being “good” and instead be able to enjoy loving and getting to know the particular little people they’re raising.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
If you’re a writer who’s in a busy season of life—maybe you’re caring for young children or aging parents or both; maybe you have a demanding job that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing—know that whatever little scraps of writing you can do will still be worth it. So much of my most recent book of poetry, Pocket Universe, started as scrawls in a notebook leaned on the steering wheel of my car in a driveway somewhere—in a few moments stolen before I had to go teach, in the parking lot at daycare pickup. And I often felt bad in those years that I wasn’t “really” writing in the way I had before I had kids. But when I eventually had the time to go back and open up that notebook, to pull up my notes on my phone and my voice memos and other little scraps, I realized that I had been writing that whole time. Even if you can only catch a moment here and there, those little bits of writing can still add up to a lot.
