ONE BAD MOTHER: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate (out Feb. 10, 2026)
By Ej Dickson
If Joan Didion grew up on Reddit, she might have written this. A fearless, darkly funny exploration of the beauty, horror and hype of modern motherhood from New York Magazine’s Ej Dickson.
What if there was no such thing as a “bad” mother? And what if everything we’ve been told about what makes a “good” woman—or a “good” mom—was a total lie?
That’s the audacious question at the heart of EJ Dickson’s new book, One Bad Mother—a darkly funny, feminist cultural reckoning that exposes how womanhood has been branded, policed, and weaponized for generations. From Medea to Meghan Markle to the American Pie MILF, Dickson traces how pop culture and politics alike have conditioned women to see care, containment, and self-sacrifice as measures of worth—and how those stories keep being repackaged as empowerment.
We’re living through a quiet cultural coup. Women are being pushed back—into the home, into silence, into impossible standards—and it’s all being sold as empowerment. From Elon Musk tweeting about birth rates to trad-wife influencers romanticizing submission, the movement to re-domesticate women isn’t fringe anymore. It’s mainstream. And it’s working.
In One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate(S&S/Simon Element; Feb. 10th), Ej Dickson exposes how we got here re-examining how the “bad mom” trope has evolved over time—from Victorian “angels in the house” to Mommie Dearest to Mormon momfluencers to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
With sharp humor and brutal honesty, One Bad Mother invites moms everywhere to stop chasing impossible standards, reclaim their autonomy, and enjoy motherhood for what it is, not what it’s “supposed” to be. It’s not a parenting book. It’s a book about womanhood: what the world demands of us, what it takes from us, and how, now more than ever, we need to find our way back to ourselves.