Maya Angelou’s mother, Vivian Baxter, sent Maya and her brother away as very young children to live with their paternal grandmother in Arkansas. When Maya returned to her mother years later, she regarded her less as a mother than as a beautiful, formidable stranger. Baxter, miraculously, does not demand to reclaim the title. Instead, she sets about earning her place in her daughter’s life.

The story is unusual in tellings of maternal abandonment. The relationship is not repaired by revisiting the original wound, but by what Vivian Baxter does afterward. She is bold, glamorous, unconventional, and fiercely protective. If she has not been present in the lead-up, she repeatedly shows up for her daughter as she forges her way into adulthood. The woman who gave Maya away as a child is ultimately the woman who teaches her independence and gives her the confidence to leave when a situation proves impossible.

Motherhood, in this telling, is not something fixed, either by biology or destiny. Rather than something that, once abandoned, must be permanently forfeited, motherhood is conceived of in this story as a relationship that can be built even belatedly, with enough attention and instructive, thoughtful action.

Édouard Louis’ mother embodies a version of motherhood as something forged under titanic economic, social, and bodily pressures. Under Louis’s early lens, in a small, working-class village in Northern France, she is a woman shaped by circumstance, a victim of structural forces, who then caused great damage to her young sons in turn. Louis writes, “Watching her when I was a child, I thought her life was already fixed forever—the village, the lack of money, the toxic presence of my father. She was in her thirties but she was like a shadow.”

And yet, in a stunning reversal, the mother reveals herself not to be so stable, as she commits to actively reshaping herself. As she changes, Louis’s understanding of her evolves, too, with the narrative repeatedly correcting its own earlier view of her. The story of motherhood, here, becomes something revisable. She remakes herself, socially, economically, and even physically.

As his mother puts it, “I’ve been pushed around all my life, but now I’m in Paris and I know Catherine Deneuve.” In the end, mother and son recognize a shared, if belated, clarity of the forces that shaped their early years together.

Mary Karr’s mother is glamorous, gun-wielding, alcoholic, and enigmatic, having been married and divorced six times in the marshy oil-refinery town of Leechfield, East Texas, twice to the girls’ father. The reader misses her anytime she is not on the page. No mind that her daughters wonder if she might shoot them as they sleep.

As Karr writes, “Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn’t whipping us, because she knew if she got started she’d kill us.”

Her daughters survive the volatile destruction and erratic intensity by relying on the family’s elaborate storytelling, on equally heightened, intense observation and adaptation. Their mother manages to survive, too, despite repeated breakdowns, her hospitalization: “This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.” This mother cannot be reduced. The book never attempts to resolve her. She is dangerous, funny, depressive, and magnetic. And you miss her when she’s gone.

Jeanette Winterson’s mother exerts a totalizing influence as she sets out to singlehandedly author her daughter’s identity in full. Growing up in an austere town in Northern England, the development of Winterson’s own religion, her destiny, her desire are all subject to her mother’s doctrinal interpretation. In an almost godlike way, the mother both creates and enforces, only allowing her daughter to glimpse certain parts of the world, permitting only those realities that align with her vision. Every piece of the child’s life is filtered through this impressive authority. As Winterson writes, “My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.” Separation, ultimately, between the two becomes immensely fraught, as it is not only emotional but ontological. Attempting to leave her mother requires the daughter to reinvent the world.