Mid-Sentence | Motherhood Across Borders

Two novelists chart the connections between motherhood, migration, race, and identity.

"For the past six years, since arriving in America, Nadia labored for a single goal: to bring her daughter here. Her sick daughter, her diabetic daughter, a daughter that... still desperately needed her mother." Irina Reyn's Mother Country sheds light on the difficulty of motherhood and how mothers examine their values for themselves and their children. Nadia's new life in Brooklyn reveals how the challenges of immigration and motherhood leave mothers to question: Who am I? Who do I want to become?  

Race and culture naturally become part of the examination, as in Rumaan Alam's That Kind of Mother, an exploration of race, class, and family.  In the novel, Rebecca, a white middle-class woman with a newborn, steps forward to adopt the child of her nanny, Priscilla, who dies suddenly in childbirth. Rebbeca "felt like an imposter ever on the verge of being unmasked." Her new experience as a mother with a black son prompts her to question: How has this affected my life? How will this impact the life of my children?  

Reyn and Alam discuss  motherhood, the relationship between parenting and identity, and how literature can speak to these issues.

Mid-Sentence presents a series of conversations with groundbreaking literary voices. Indie authors and cult favorites explore the intersections between literature and lived experience.

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.