In Praise of Problematic Women

There’s nothing more villainous, no figure more reviled, than a bad mother. This is what we’ve been told time and again, in movies and TV shows from Mommie Dearest and Carrie to Mad Men and The Sopranos, where the mother monster shows up in all her pill-popping, guilt-tripping, fright wig-wearing splendor to wreak havoc on her innocent children’s—and our—psyches. But why is the bad mother such an omnipresent figure in popular culture? Where does the trope come from, and what if she—gasp—wasn’t so bad after all? This is what I set out to explore in my new book, One Bad Mother, out now via Simon & Schuster, which explores the history of “bad” moms from stage parents to momfluencers to anti vaxxers to MLM Karens. Below, a celebration of some of my favorite bad moms from fiction, from the archetypical overbearing suburban Jewish bubbes to horny housewives.