I seem to keep reading books about women’s personal traumas, and how they interweave. I often feel like I’m watching a train wreck with popcorn, or I feel straight-up yucky having seen intimate situations that feel hyperreal and like no one’s benefitted from the experience (neither the characters or the reader.) The Mothers had a genuineness that I wish was in the others (especially Little Fires Everywhere). That’s what makes this book head and shoulders above the others.

The ending is neither contrived nor left messy. That’s a hard thing to nail when the book is examining messy parts of people’s lives.