Others Like Me: Childfree, Childless & building lives outside motherhood

Women writers without children:

The Bronte sisters, Emily Dikinson, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, Christina Rosetti, Virginia Woolf, Kathering Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Octavia E Butler, Elizabeth Bishop, Gabriela Mistral, Hilary Mantel, Bernadine Evaristo, Arundhati Roy and many more.

All this time, they had been there, lined up on my bookshelves like an army of godesses and I had not noticed them... I had been walking around thinking I was following a secret path unknown to all humans before me. When in reality, some of my favourite authors had been there and done that many decades, even centuries ago...One by one, I reread them, this time with new eyes. I felt less lonely when immersed in their words and decoding their lives. And for a while, that was all I wanted.

- Nicole Louie, Others Like Me

After the reading, came the interviews, and from there a tremendous book blending memoir and testimony, offering roadmaps of experience and glimpses into ways of living and loving and family making outside of motherhood.

Others Like Me is a vital resource and tremendous gift in offering alternatives to enduring social and cultural narratives that still centre motherhood.

It is long past time for us to make a space for childfree life, to recognise it as equally rewarding, valuable, worthwhile as the alternative. Let us make space for myriad kinds of womanhood, for womanhood without motherhood, for conversations of (in)fertility, abortion and chosen family stripped of shame.

And so here, a book list to compliment Nicole's phenomneal book, for anyone exploring this other path. Some are team favourites, some are drawn from the author's curated book lists here.

Do also join our discussion with Nicole Louie, in person or online, on June 18th, details here.