Motherhood: A Confession

A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood.

What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's—even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.

The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many p...