As a novelist and a mother, I’m often asked how I manage to write while parenting two young children. The implication of this question is that children demand so much of your time and attention, it’s impossible to have anything left for yourself let alone a creative practice. Children, so this logic goes, may be the best kind of distraction, but they are a distraction nonetheless, an impediment to getting work done. Generally, interviewers and readers want to know your secret, so they can apply it to their own lives or can marvel at how you manage it all. While these questions are asked with the best of intentions, they showcase the expectations placed on mothers to be the right kind of mother. In addition to placing a tremendous amount of pressure on women, they also contribute to the culture of silence around struggling as a parent.
While it’s true that your schedule has to change with kids, you can’t work until eight and then start cooking dinner or resist the siren call of a snuggle, motherhood isn’t an impediment to a writing career. In my experience, being a mother has fundamentally changed the way I think about writing and life. My children are constantly doing things that make me go, That would be a good set up for a book. Simply put, having children has expanded my imagination and the kinds of stories I want to tell.
But the code of silence is real. The pressure to be a perfect mother and to love all aspects of parenting is real. And it starts the moment you decide you want to have a baby. Or the moment you don’t, if motherhood isn’t for you.
Like any code of silence, it’s one that people are trying to break. Celebrities and influencers are using their platforms to speak out about fertility struggles and the reality behind the glossy façade of easy parenting. And writers are writing about it. In recent years, there has been a wealth of books about pregnancy and new motherhood. They capture the challenges and joys, the reluctancies and privileges. The anticipations and fears.
Cue the mom-thriller. I’m not sure it’s a term anyone else uses, but it’s one I’m determined to make stick. Thrillers are a great venue for writing about motherhood. There’s so much about pregnancy and motherhood that is terrifying, and suspense serves as a good way of exposing those fears in an exaggerated form, of breaking the silence.
Here are a few of my favorites over the last several years, novels that not only made my heart pound but that have made me reflect on the assumptions and beliefs I hold about motherhood.
The Push by Ashley Audrain
No mom-thriller list would be complete without this novel. When I first read it, it felt like the start of a new era of books about motherhood. No one believes Blythe’s intuition about her daughter, sometimes not even the reader themselves. Every sentence in this novel hits. The writing is absolutely breathtaking and the questions about what makes a “good” mother and a “bad” child are an inventive take on the common fear that there might be something wrong with your child.
Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza
While this book has been marketed as a thriller about tradwives and influencer culture, at its heart, it’s a novel about motherhood. Grappling with everything from the everyday struggles of balancing parenting, marriage and a career to the unrealistic expectations social media places on all moms, including influencers themselves, this novel gets at the heart of the pressures of contemporary motherhood.
Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner
Really any book by Katherine Faulkner could go on this list. They are all astute, slow-burn but heart-thumping thrillers about early motherhood. This one is my favorite, though. Set in Posh Greenwich Park, London, this novel again scratches at the surface of perfection. Here, we get glimpses into the isolation of pregnancy and those early days of motherhood, as well as the pressures on women to be agreeable and accommodating.
Her One Regret by Donna Freitas
The most recent addition to the mom-thriller genre, this novel is an inventive take on reluctant motherhood. When a baby is found abandoned in a grocery store parking lot, it’s unclear if her mother left her or was kidnapped herself. In this twisty novel, Freitas offers several voices to explore Lucy’s disappearance. Together, they offer a range of perspectives on motherhood as well as the many judgments that come with it.
Pinky Swear by Danielle Girard
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
I don’t know if there are any parents who haven’t been tempted to leave the monitor on while your baby is asleep and slip next door for a glass of wine. Most of us don’t, and we judge those that do even as we’re envious of them. The Couple Next Door takes this common premise and realizes its most basic fear: while you’re partying next door, someone kidnaps your baby from her crib. While the story veers more into a police procedural from here, the premise, as well as the guilt and depression Anne feels, put it squarely in the mom-thriller category. For, what happens to baby Cora is not as simple as a moment of bad judgment, which can remind readers not to be too quick to cast blame.
Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine
This one is more horror, a Rosemary’s Baby-type story that has some of the best writing about IVF that I’ve ever read. Danielle Valentine makes every step of pregnancy terrifying. This book is a wild ride, one that veers into supernatural territory while exposing the very real ways men doubt women’s accounts of their own experiences.
Amy Meyerson’s next book, The Water Lies, publishes from Thomas & Mercer on January 1, 2026.
