Motherest: A Novel

Jenny Offill meets Maria Semple in an inventive and moving coming-of-age novel that captures the pain of fractured family life, the heat of new love, and the particular magic of the female friendship--while interrogating the complexities of daughter-mother love.

It's the early 1990s, and as a new college student, Agnes is caught between the broken home she leaves behind and the wilderness of campus life. What she needs most is her mother, who has disappeared once and for all, and her brother, who left the family tragically a few years prior.

As Agnes tries to find her footing, she writes letters to her mother to conjure a closeness they never had. But when she finds out she is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your own mother. The end of the world as she knows it is also the beginning of a brand new one.