Mother of All Myths

By Aminatta Forna

1998

First Published

4.03

Average Rating

288

Number of Pages

8H47M

Audio Length

A provocative and debate-inspiring book which explores the pressure, politics, philosophy and culture of motherhood in today’s society. Motherhood has changed. For a number of reasons rooted in the way society and our lifestyles have altered we now approach motherhood and mothering very differently to previous generations. For several decades there has been tension between traditional ideas and modern values of mothering. For years the trend was away from the constraints which bound down our own mothers and towards liberating women. But in the 1980s and 1990s the momentum has shifted into sharp reverse. Mother of All Myths documents the present backlash, examining responses in the media, the courts, the government, in medicine and through ‘pop’ psychology, which reasserts an old-fashioned, conservative and narrow view of what a mother should be and do. In addition, the author explores the strong, highly idealized concept of motherhood that exists in the West; finding reflections of that image in history, in Christianity, in literature and in mythology. So why is this backlash happening now and who is losing out? This powerful book provides a long-overdue debate on motherhood by pressing that society should not only rethink our concept of mothering and responsibility, but strip motherhood of the worst excesses of sentimentality thereby allowing the mother’s needs to be more evenly balanced against those of the child.

Avg Rating

4.03

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

41%

4 STARS

29%

3 STARS

21%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Aminatta Forna

Author · 8 books

Aminatta’s books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize. In 2003 Aminatta established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has also run a number of projects in the spheres of adult education, sanitation and maternal health. Aminatta is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. She has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award and the Warwick Prize. Aminatta Forna was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.