Secure your preorder of MotherPerson now to ensure you don’t miss this highly anticipated release from an award-winning novelist and respected educator.

What happens when a woman realizes she has disappeared inside her own life? And what would it take to come back into full view?

Claire has survived everything life could throw at her―addiction, grief, single motherhood, ambition that didn’t go as planned, and love that arrived in the wrong shape at the wrong time. Now, in midlife, she’s finally done pretending. She wants the truth―about her marriage, her desires, her talent, and the woman she once promised herself she’d become.

Told in razor-sharp, luminous prose, MotherPerson follows Claire across New York, London, Dallas, Chicago, and a dusty artist’s retreat in Taos as she confronts the roles she was handed―wife, daughter, mother, teacher―and the one she buried: herself. Her journey is messy, funny, raw, hopeful, and deeply human as she falls for an Irish painter, battles the stereotypes that try to shrink her, and ignites the spirits of students who’ve nearly given up.

What emerges is a portrait of a woman refusing to disappear―choosing, instead, to live wide awake. Bold, intimate, and defiantly honest, MotherPerson is a story for every woman who has ever wondered: Where did I go―and how do I get myself back?

Preorder MotherPerson on Amazon:

“This book is a banshee wail against trad-wife erasure. I cannot wait for readers to experience Molly’s singularly vivid voice.” –Alisa Jones, Empress Editions

Short Biography

Molly Moynahan is an award-winning author, writing coach, college essay expert, editor, English teacher, and supportive high school academic coach with over thirty years of publishing experience. Her latest book Motherperson is her most personal and powerful novel to date. Her coaching creates independence and a writing practice that focuses on the process as much as results. She is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Stone Garden, Living in Arcadia, and Parting is All We Know of Heaven. A former high school and college teacher and lifelong advocate for literature as a tool of transformation, her essays and stories have appeared in The New World Review, Literary Mama, The Huffington Post, and Mademoiselle magazine. Visit mmwriting.com and subscribe to her Substack at substack.com/@mollymoynahan.

Extended Biography

Molly Moynahan is an award-winning author, writing coach, college essay expert, editor, biography writer, speech writer, English teacher, and supportive high school academic coach with over thirty years of publishing experience. Her coaching creates independence and a writing practice that focuses on the process as much as results.

She is a strong advocate for the academic community, whether she is supporting students, teachers, administrators, or parents, in their mutual hope for improving student achievement.

She supports parents of children with learning disabilities, anxiety disorders focused on writing, and coaching C-suite executives. She is also a writing coach and editor for fiction, business books, memoirs, and personal essays. Her first two novels were published in the late nineties with Stone Garden, a New York Times Notable Book published in 2003. She currently resides in Northern Michigan.

Molly Moynahan is the recipient of several grants and awards including a fellowship to write digital stories at the National Gallery in Washington, a fellowship to study the short story at The University of Chicago, several writing residencies, and a grant to bring a poet into her classroom. As a literacy consultant for Changing Worlds, she worked with teaching artists to bring art and writing to Chicago and Evanston Public Schools. Molly is currently living, writing, and teaching in Leland, Michigan.

She started her writing career in New York City, moved to London, Dallas, Chicago and Leland. She received a Master in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College after completing her undergraduate degree (BA) in English and history at Rutgers University and Trinity College in Dublin. She worked for several years as an editor for Random House and Bantam-Doubleday-Dell in New York City, moving into writing and teaching after receiving her first book deal. She has taught writing and creative writing at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, City Lit in London, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, and Loyola University.

Official Photos

Press Release for Molly Moynahan’s Latest Book, Motherperson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From Acclaimed New York Times Notable Author Molly Moynahan Comes A Darkly Funny, Deeply Moving Novel About The Cost Of Becoming Visible—And The Courage Required To Stay That Way

MOTHERPERSON

What does it cost a woman to become visible?

In MotherPerson, acclaimed New York Times Notable author Molly Moynahan delivers a razor-sharp, deeply moving, and unexpectedly funny novel about identity, family, reinvention, and the perilous business of becoming oneself.

At a moment when women are reexamining caregiving, ambition, belonging, and the stories they've inherited about who they are supposed to be, MotherPerson asks a question that feels both urgent and timeless: What happens when a woman decides she can no longer remain invisible?

Written with extraordinary emotional intelligence, mordant wit, and hard-won wisdom, Moynahan's novel explores the tension between selfhood and obligation, love and expectation, disappearance and visibility. It is as likely to make readers laugh out loud as it is to leave them quietly wrecked.

With the keen observation, emotional depth, and literary grace that have made Moynahan one of the most beloved voices of her generation, MotherPerson is both a brilliant novel of family life and a searching examination of what women sacrifice—and what they reclaim—on the journey toward becoming fully themselves.

For readers of Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Lombardo, and Catherine Newman, MotherPerson is a novel about the stories we inherit, the identities we perform, and the courage required to claim our own lives.

A novel about the cost of becoming visible—and why, despite everything, it's worth paying.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Moynahan is an award-winning novelist, editor, and writing coach whose work explores motherhood, identity, marriage, reinvention, and the emotional complexities of women’s lives.

She is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Stone Garden, a New York Times Notable Book, and has received fellowships, grants, and residencies in recognition of her literary work. A former editor at Random House and Bantam Doubleday Dell, Moynahan has spent more than three decades shaping stories as a novelist, teacher, editor, and mentor to writers across publishing, academia, and the creative arts.

She has taught fiction and literature at Rutgers University, Brooklyn College, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, Loyola University, and City Lit in London.

Known for her incisive voice and unflinching portrayals of modern womanhood, Moynahan writes literary fiction that speaks directly to the hidden lives of women, mothers, artists, and seekers navigating the long road back to themselves.

She lives and writes in northern Michigan.

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

Title: MotherPerson
Author: Molly Moynahan
Publisher: Empress Editions
Publication Date: October 2026
Format: Trade Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
MotherPerson Paperback ISBN: 9798993936550
MotherPerson Ebook ISBN: 9798993936598
Price: $21.99
Page Count: 271
Available wherever books are sold.

MEDIA CONTACT

For review copies, author interviews, event inquiries, speaking engagements, and media requests, please contact:
Empress Editions
Publicity & Marketing
alisa@empresseditions.net
Digital press kit, author photographs, and review materials available upon request.

ABOUT EMPRESS EDITIONS

Empress Editions is the largest independent U.S. publisher dedicated exclusively to stories by and for women in midlife. Publishing bold fiction, unforgettable memoir, romance, mystery, culture, and conversation-starting nonfiction, Empress champions voices that explore reinvention, desire, friendship, ambition, family, and the complicated joy of becoming oneself.

Founded on the belief that women's most powerful stories are often still ahead of them, Empress publishes books that entertain, provoke, comfort, and connect readers during one of life's most transformative chapters.

Learn more at empresseditions.net.

Earlier Works

“Moynahan’s smooth, playful prose is engaging.” –Publishers Weekly

“I found myself missing Alice’s voice after I finished the book.” –Chicago Tribune

“Moynahan’s gift to her reader is this fully realized character; I found myself missing Alice’s voice.” –Chicago Tribune

“Stone Garden by Molly Moynahan is such a literary treat. Moynahan is a new voice that knows how to tell a story.”
–Teen Voice

“Well-told...moving...Moynahan has crafted an excellent story.” –Dallas Morning Star-Telegram

“Moynahan’s smooth, playful prose is engaging.” –Publishers Weekly

“Alice McGuire...is just as smart and funny as Holden Caulfield...[Her] voice is newly wise and altogether heartbreaking .... remarkable.” –Trenton Times

I was obsessed with Stone Garden when I read it in 2003 as a high school senior in New Jersey. I wrote quotes from it in notebooks, sobbed reading it, and still think about that book. I have periodically googled you as I transitioned from an emotional 16 year old into a librarian, writer, and mother. Now as I am on sub with my own novel, I am a daily reader of Pub Marketplace and was delighted to read your deal announcement. It sounds like exactly the kind of book I want to read for the person I am now. And I love to see someone sticking around in this grueling business for the long haul. I can't wait to pick up a copy. –Erinn Salge

Moynahan is a talented writer who is not afraid to expose every raw nerve. –The Sunday Times

“So honest, so sad and so consistently entertaining . . . Moynahan's first novel will win her more than a few instantly loyal fans.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Moynahan is sparse and restrained in her use of emotive language…So absorbed was I by this book that I read it in one exhausting sitting …It is, in a word, powerful.” –More Magazine

“Full of anger and compassion.” –Madison Smartt Bell

“Contains more real energy, passion, humour and drama than half a dozen restrained and overwritten yuppie novels.” –Alison Lurie

“An entertaining first novel ... an effective insight into the raw pain of loss.” –Daily Mail