"Me Time": Motherhood, Reading, and Myths of Leisure

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project_muse_902736.pdf (339.2 KB)

Links to Files

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/902736

Permanent Link

https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0041
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/41486

Collections

UMBC American Studies Department
UMBC Asian Studies
UMBC English Department
UMBC Faculty Collection

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6004-8394
 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6593-6609

Date

2023

Type of Work

journal articles
Text

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Bhalla, Tamara, and Lindsay DiCuirci. “‘Me Time’: Motherhood, Reading, and Myths of Leisure.” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 15, no. 1 (2023): 41–49.

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Subjects

UMBC English Honors Program

Abstract

In this micro article, the authors survey the media landscape,including bestseller lists and celebrity book club culture, thinkpieces and mommy blogs, to examine the discourse around "me time,"reading, and motherhood. The article explores how the cultivationof "me time," which is ostensibly about taking time away frommothering, returns mothers to the work of self-improvement,disguised as self-care. The books that mothers are reading (judgedby their posts online, book awards, bestseller lists, book clubculture, etc.) and the ways they are blogging about "me time"reading suggests that under the conditions of twenty-first-centuryneoliberalism, reading mothers must use this time to meditate uponand improve their mothering. "Me time" reading is framed as aseparation from maternal labor but instead impels mothers tojustify their solitary habit and redeem reading as a contributionto—rather than detraction from—family life.