A frank, feminist examination of the hidden crisis of rage facing American mothers—and how we can fix it! Bay Area author Minna Dubin visits North Branch to discuss her new book with Berkeley author Yael Goldstein-Love.
Mothers aren’t supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by the grueling, thankless work of full-time parenting and feeling her career slip away, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding at her husband.
When Dubin pushed past her shame and talked with other mothers about how she was feeling, she realized that she was far from alone. Mom Rage is Dubin’s groundbreaking work of reportage about an unspoken crisis of anger sweeping the country—and the world. She finds that while a specific instance of rage might be triggered by something as simple as a child who won’t tie her shoes, the roots of the anger go far deeper, from the unequal burden of childcare shouldered by moms to the flattening of women’s identities once they have kids. Drawing on insights from moms across the spectrum of race, sexual orientation, and class, she offers practical tools to help readers disarm their rage in the moment, while never losing sight of the broader social change we need to stop raging for good.
Minna Dubin (she/her) is a writer and mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Parents, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Romper, The Forward, Hobart, MUTHA Magazine, and Literary Mama. She is the recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. As a leading feminist voice on mom rage, Minna has appeared on MSNBC, Good Morning America, The Tamron Hall Show, NBC10 Boston, and NPR.
Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, a speculative thriller about the psychological transition to motherhood. Her doctoral dissertation examined how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children. She currently practices as a psychological associate in private practice seeing individual adults and couples as she works toward her licensure in clinical psychology. She is a graduate of Harvard University, where she studied philosophy, and attends The Wright Institute. She lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA.