Preorder a signed first edition copy of Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture by Sara Petersen, releasing April 25th, 2023! Get an exclusive Momfluenced sticker sheet with your preorder, while supplies last!
On Instagram, the private work of mothering is turned into a public performance, generating billions of dollars. The message is simple: we're all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood.
Linen-clad momfluencers hawking essential oils, parenting manuals, baby slings, and sponsored content for Away suitcases make us want to forget that the reality of mothering in America is an isolating, exhausting, almost wholly unsupported endeavor. In a culture which denies mothers basic human rights, it feels good to click “purchase now” on whatever a momfluencer might be selling. It feels good to hope.
Drawing on her own fraught relationship to momfluencer culture, Sara Petersen incorporates pop culture analysis, interviews with prominent momfluencers and experts (psychologists, academics, technologists) to explore the glorification of the ideal mama online with both humor and empathy. For fans of Lyz Lenz's Belabored, and Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Momfluenced argues that momfluencers don’t simply sell mothers on the benefits of bamboo diapers, they sell us the dream of motherhood itself, a dream tangled up in whiteness, capitalism, and the heteronormative nuclear family.
Momfluenced considers what it means to define motherhood for ourselves when society is determined to define motherhood for us.
Preorder details:
If you would like the book personalized with a name or special message, please let us know in the order comment field. Books will be signed before the release date (April 25th, 2023) and will be shipped to arrive roughly on release date. We ship media mail (free) or Priority mail (not free) within the US, and internationally as well. Exclusive Momfluenced sticker sheets (pictured below) will be included with each preorder while supplies last!
Advance Praise for Momfluenced:
"Reading this book feels like having the best, most nourishing conversation about media, race, capitalism, and the collective public scream that is parenting right now with a friend who has done all the reading. Petersen's deep research, smart analysis, and warmth makes this essential reading for parents who want to know what pulls us toward the endless scrolling that is an inescapable part of our twenty-first-century lives."
--Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child
"Momfluenced makes rich text of our often mindless scrolling, unpacking the ways performances of social media motherhood help and hinder parenting in its personal and political spheres. This book provides all the delicious pleasures of envy-snarking on the neutrals of your newsfeed, plus the necessary catharsis of your favorite group text, with the bonus of nutrient-rich research into how race, class, and politics influence our cultural conception of the ideal mother and why mindful consumption might be the first step to change. I'm so glad we have Sara Petersen's voice to unravel these complexities with humor and pathos."
--Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and Maddalena and the Dark
"Reading Momfluenced is like having a frank conversation about motherhood, gender, and capitalism with someone much smarter, wittier and well-read than I am. Sara's vulnerable, incisive and funny-as-hell take on momfluencer culture will stay with me for a long time. Fans of Under the Influence will gobble it up." - Jo Piazza, bestselling author, and host of the Under the Influence podcast
Sara Petersen is a writer based in New Hampshire. Her essays about feminism, domesticity, and motherhood have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, InStyle, Glamour, and elsewhere. She also writes a newsletter about the myth of the ideal mother, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops.
