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?

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“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

July 25, 2025 Empress Editions Acquires Exclusive World Rights to MotherPerson by Molly Moynahan — A Brilliantly Vivid Portrait of Love, Loss, and Becoming in Midlife

Cambridge, MA — Empress Editions, the fiercely independent publisher redefining women’s literature in midlife and beyond, is thrilled to announce the acquisition of exclusive world rights to MotherPerson, a luminous new novel by celebrated author Molly Moynahan (Stone Garden), whose work has been hailed by The New York Times Book Review for its “sparkling wit and wisdom.” The novel is set for global publication in Fall 2026, with distribution powered by Hachette Book Group.

With singular warmth, humor, and unflinching honesty, MotherPerson follows Claire, a woman who’s survived addiction, grief, single motherhood, and the ever-complicating gauntlet of ambition and love. Told in prose that crackles with insight and emotional clarity, the novel captures a modern woman’s battle to remain fully herself while navigating all the titles she’s been handed — wife, daughter, mother, person — and the spaces between.

“I wanted to write a novel that feels like waking up in someone else’s head at two o’clock in the morning,” says Moynahan. “The thoughts are real, full of love and regret, and half-mistaken — but completely alive. MotherPerson is about what it takes to stay visible in a life that keeps asking you to disappear.”

Set across New York, London, Dallas, Chicago, and a dusty artist’s retreat in Taos, the novel tracks Claire’s reckoning with ambition, marriage, and selfhood as she gives herself permission — finally — to tell the truth. Whether navigating a love affair with an Irish painter, battling female stereotypes in Texas, or inspiring traumatized students in a gang-ridden Chicago classroom, Claire’s voice is unforgettable: raw, funny, luminous, and absolutely necessary.

“This novel is alive in every sense of the word,” says Alisa Kennedy Jones, publisher of Empress Editions. “It’s a roadmap for becoming — written in lipstick, scratched into journal margins, and whispered through the cracks of every woman who’s ever wondered, where did I go in all of this? It’s wild, beautiful, and necessary.”

Empress Editions is an independent publishing house devoted to championing the voices of women who refuse to disappear. With global distribution by Hachette Book Group, Empress is a lighthouse in a sea of forgettable content, publishing bold, enduring stories that speak to every season of a woman’s life. substack.com/@alisajones.

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