Know the Mother

This collection make clear that to know in a mothering sense, to live the medium of the mothering body, is to experience worlds so amplified that even their briefest glimpsed stories can both terrify and beautifully overwhelm.

Know the Mother will haunt you as you applaud that fact that Cooper’s women have been given a voice, a dignity previously unseen.

The flash fiction genre fits Cooper’s neat, abbreviated, aesthetic, and feels perfect for mothers who don’t have time for more than a morsel at each sitting, but who want to feel satisfied at the end of each selection. Each piece may hone in on a different topic—gender bias, racism, classicism—but the leitmotif remains womanhood, motherhood, family life.

Desiree Cooper’s Know the Mother is grim, but a necessary antidote to the prevailing simplistic view of motherhood. Cooper is a masterful and descriptive writer. When she describes a "big, fat baby" named Tessie in the story "To The Bone," the reader can almost touch the babe’s fat, brown, dimpled knees. The richness of her prose allows Cooper to capture life’s small moments and render a more fulsome picture of maternity. But the writer truly excels at illustrating emotion and empathy. The reader comes to know the mother by feeling what the mother feels--anxiety, despair, loneliness, irritation, love.

The stories in Desiree Cooper’s lyrical debut collection, Know the Mother, are razor-edged, quick-footed, powerful. Cooper’s language cuts and stuns, lulls and disturbs.

Every once in a while you read a book and it blows you away. KNOW THE MOTHER was that for me.

Desiree Cooper keeps catching fire.

Desiree Cooper's Know the Mother is one of the most singularly focused short story collections I've encountered that wasn't really a novel-in-stories, or a collection of stories about a specific character or entity.

The stories within the book explore gender and race and many other topics that have touched her life in some way. And not all of them are heartwarming, but rather, the truth.

Desiree Cooper's Know the Mother is a collection of thirty vignettes that examine how migrations changed the fabric of families and particularly motherhood. Young women had to make their own way – to forge for themselves the demarcation between home and the outside world, what was expected of them, and what goals they had to live up to. Motherhood was no longer cast in the direct shadow of grandmothers, and mothers-in-law, but rather shaped by the social and cultural biases of racism and sexism through which they navigated, seemingly alone. If motherhood was the icing on the cake, she held together what was under that icing. Should the mother remain unchanged, a fixer or a giver commanded merely by her role?

I cannot name a favorite story because each one emits emotions that put me squarely into the main characters' shoes... Cooper creates complex and real characters with few words because her writing is splendid, moving, and true.

Are short stories your thing? Consider Desiree Cooper’s collection of taut flash fiction, Know the Mother. A journalist by training, Cooper efficiently delivers all that’s needed to move a reader.

Cooper's stories jump off directly in the midst of secret, highly fraught emotions, capturing snapshots that radiate love, intimacy, fear and loss. "Know the Mother" is a series of 30 gut-punches - brief, ruthlessly effective and hitting the reader directly in the vitals.

Make no mistake: This is not a collection of stories in which to seek solace. There is no mother’s comforting touch. Instead, there is the harsh but refreshing reality of motherhood in all of its complexity, rendered through portraits of women in moments of both pain and strength. Each story offers a beautiful, if brief, look into these women’s lives, and just as we begin to understand the inner workings of each character, we are spirited away to the next tale. Cooper’s collection teaches just how difficult it is to ever completely know the mother and even for the mother to completely understand her own identity. As Cooper writes of one character grappling with new motherhood, She marveled at how she had arrived at the other end of childbirth a stranger even to herself.

Know the Mother is refreshing in its honesty and boldness, venturing into the crevices and corners of motherhood and womanhood to places that aren’t always pleasant, but are natural and inevitable. Cooper has mastered the compressed form of flash fiction, delivering vignettes that pull you in, surprise you, and then let you go on one level—but keep you meditating on them at another, as the layers of meaning peel away one by one.