Moyra Davey – författare

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

This anthology of writings on motherhood turns the spotlight away from the child to the mother herself. Memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays and fiction describe the powerful changes brought into these writers' lives by pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Contributors include Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Leguin, Grace Paley and Alice Walker. The editor is a photographer for The New York Times.

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter—with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book—and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.