The Joys of Motherhood Summary
Buchi Emecheta

The Joys of Motherhood Overview

This novel, first written and published in 1979, is the story of an indigenous Nigerian woman struggling to be what she believes to be a good mother while also struggling to reconcile her traditional rural culture with quickly evolving urban life. Both these sets of struggles play out within a cultural and narrative context of racially-defined colonialism, all of which are in turn thematically connected to explorations of the relationship between the dead and the living, and of the qualities and experiences of being a woman.