Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

    • Discover millions of audiobooks, ebooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    That Kind of Mother: A Novel
    That Kind of Mother: A Novel
    That Kind of Mother: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    That Kind of Mother: A Novel

    Written by Rumaan Alam

    Narrated by Vanessa Johansson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY Buzzfeed • The Boston Globe •  The Millions • InStyle • Southern Living

    “With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam’s second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking.”
       — Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

    From the celebrated author of Rich and Pretty, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep

    Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help—Priscilla Johnson—and begs her to come home with them as her son’s nanny.


    Priscilla’s presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca’s perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.


    Written with the warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the lives we choose, and the lives that are chosen for us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 8, 2018
    ISBN9780062847720
    That Kind of Mother: A Novel
    Author

    Rumaan Alam

    Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and the instant New York Times bestseller Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

    More audiobooks from Rumaan Alam

    Related to That Kind of Mother

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for That Kind of Mother

    3.5/5

    101 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5

      Sep 9, 2023

      I am very much amazed This writer is a man. A great book.
    • 3/5

      Dec 8, 2021

      Depressing
    • 2/5

      Sep 5, 2021

      I have no idea what I read (?) or listened to in this case. The book is beautifully written and would possibly work better in reading than listening. In my opinion though, it tried to tackle too many themes and dealt with them in broad strokes without cutting to the essence of any. There are the subjects of motherhood, the families we are born into and those we create, the breakdown of marriage, and the differences between white privilege and black survival. Mostly, however, it is about one privileged woman who did not sufficiently address or question her privileges.

      The story starts with Rebecca giving birth to her son Jacob. She is overwhelmed by new motherhood, and finds it hard to cope, she enlists the help of Priscilla, the lactation consultants, and asks her to become her nanny. They build a symbiotic relationship, but while Priscilla only benefited from the Rebecca Stone financially, Rebecca thought that the nanny's presence helped her cope, accept and enjoy motherhood. When Priscilla becomes pregnant then dies shortly after childbirth, Rebecca adopts baby Andrew.

      It was hard for me to understand how a mother who talked about throwing her own child from the window found it so easy to adopt a child not of her own flesh. So while she dealt with her own child as a spoiled rich girl, she brought up the child of another woman as her own, and this time she did it herself, finally becoming a full-time mother to her own child as well. Rebecca is a poet, has a touch of the spoiled rich girl about her. It is interesting that at the beginning of the story, and several times throughout she link herself to Princess Diana, another privileged white woman with a highly public yet emotionally vacuous lifestyle.
      Near the end of the book there is an imagined dialogue Rebecca has with the princess, and wonders whether her kindness and charity, her sympathy for children who lost limbs to mines, or AIDS patient was only for the cameras. Perhaps Rebecca did question whether it was the same with her, adopting this baby, although she was always sensitive against those who praised her charity and heroism adopting a black child.

      I am not a great fan of poetry, or perhaps I did not read good poetry. In the book Rebecca says that poetry is as much about the reader as it is about the written text. It is open-ended to the point that it resonates with what you already have inside you (I am not sure I am quoting her any passage of the book or paraphrasing my own understanding in light of what I have read). In this respect the book comes across to me like a piece of poetry that I did not understand, because it did not resonate with what I have inside. I am a mother myself but I accepted motherhood readily and instantly, and I do not understand how long it took Rebecca to embrace motherhood and weave it into her life and craft as a poet. I could not help think also that she lived life within her own head, as poets and writers do. Her idealism and optimism will be hard to stick to in the current social and political climate. The book ends prior to the current Trump era, and I daresay that if a sequel was to be written in the current time, it will only show that her belief in raising her black son and white son as equals was unrealistic. The omens of doom for the black son are already there in this volume.

      Postscript: After writing this review I found out that the author is male. I am now wondering whether the dissonance I felt was because of this biological fact that removes him from the actual experience of motherhood. It is commendable how he unflinchingly dealt with aspects of labour and childbirth, breastfeeding and child-rearing, but there is something missing there that aludes me. Motherhood, after all, is more than the sum of its painful and unsightly parts, and more than its daily drudgery.
    • 3/5

      Jan 22, 2019

      I must have chosen to read this book on the suggestion of a book list. While it was very different from the genre I normally read, it was interesting, but just not my cup of tea. It explored motherhood and its changes to a marriage, to a family, to children. It explored a black child being raised by a white family.
      It began in 1985 and continued through to 1999, and I did enjoy reliving my memories of those years when the author mentioned a particular event or piece of culture.

      #ThatKindOfMother #RumaanAlam
    • 5/5

      Jan 13, 2019

      Excellent book. Tracing a family in the 80’s and 90’s. The book stops at the end of the 90’s making you wish we could undo the pasted 19 years. Interesting premise.
    • 4/5

      Jun 19, 2018

      Set in the late 1980s, here's a surprising novel about an upper middle class white mother who adopts her nanny's baby. Rebecca, married to a British diplomat, has just given birth and convinces a helpful hospital La Leche worker, Priscilla, to become her nanny. Rebecca is uncomfortable and embarrassed by her helplessness and cherishes Priscilla's ability to provide order to the household, even allowing her to resume her successful career as a poet (I told you it was surprising). Tragedy intervenes as Priscilla, pregnant at 43, dies in childbirth. Her closest kin, daughter Cheryl, is also about to give birth and is not able to take in her brother Andrew. Rebecca and her husband, and Cheryl and her husband, agree to the adoption. Rebecca is a well-meaning liberal but is clueless about how the upbringing of Andrew, from explaining it all to him, to keeping his hair and skin healthy, to giving him "the talk", must be different than raising her other son Jacob. She puts little value on Cheryl's advice. As a result, Andrew's story cannot be predicted. The story of a white woman is well written by a man of color, but having only Rebecca's point of view renders it all too narrow.

      Quotes: "The women were where the women always ended up but never mind because the kitchen was a household's actual seat of power."

      "A year ago she'd have thought Yale University where she wanted to be, but there she was and it was devoid of whatever she had hoped to find there."

      "Black kids don't get to be kids much longer than twelve, really."