New York Times columnist Judith Warner made a name for herself as an intelligent advocate for a saner modern motherhood with her seminal 2005 book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. Here, she reminds us that we can find as much inspiration from pregnancy guides as from poetry and as much meaning from children's books as from memoirs.

What to Expect When You're Expecting

"I know some people find such books patronizing, but I didn't find them that way at all. I was reading them in a different context: I was reading them in France. The information was so straightforward. But some of the things I took from this guide were perceived as odd there. For example, not drinking alcohol and not drinking coffee during pregnancy were just not part of the culture. You couldn't sit at dinner and not have a glass of wine in front of you; I would drink a quarter of it. So I took seriously what was in the American books, but I applied it less stringently. It was an interesting contrast. For me, it was also about loving a book that had lists: The guide was normative and structured, with all the steps laid out. That is soothing to me on a very deep level."

The Little House series

"The Little House books carried me through all the anxious times of my childhood. I'd always thought that reading about the hardships of cold and hunger had given me some childhood version of schadenfreude, making my own anxieties easier to bear. Now, when I reread the books with my daughters, though, I have another insight: The books actually provide an escape into a wonderful home, because of the way they portray Charles and Caroline's love for each other. This is a big part of what makes Laura (and by extension, perhaps, made me) feel so cozy and warm in bed at night. In our current collective imagination, how much imagery do we have of parents who love and enjoy each other like this? Who aren't harried and snapping at each other, whose children don't worry—once they become aware of the threat—that they will someday get divorced? There's a lesson in that."

Love Works Like This

"I very rarely relate to motherhood memoirs. Maybe when you're reading this kind of book, you want such a deep degree of relating to the writers that you have a higher standard. I so often feel alienated. But Slater's voice is moving and poignant. She stopped taking her psychiatric medication for the sake of her child while she was pregnant. She had to. I think on a lesser scale, or in different forms, mothers have to deal with that kind of decision all the time. I don't suffer from depression as Slater does, so I have not had to confront the same issues about medication, but I can relate to the idea of strong emotions and having to do battle with them. I've had to think about reining in my emotions in order to be the best mother I can be."

American Pastoral

"Here's the funny thing: I read this book when it came out in 1997, the same year my older daughter was born. I absolutely loved it. And there was one line I thought I remembered that summed up the physicality of the love of a parent for her baby. But when I went to find that sentence for this interview, I couldn't find it. Instead I found a passage. I think that often happens with books—you remember parts differently, but the memory feels so vivid as to be true. In the passage, the character describes his physical love for his young daughter and imagines that must be what the breastfeeding bond felt like for his wife. 'The carefreeness, the abandon of that body in his arms... It is so, it is true—in the abandon of her body to him,' Roth writes, 'she excites an instinct for reassurance that is so abundant that it must be close to what Dawn says she felt when she was lactating.' But here is the real trick of my memory: In looking this novel over again, I remembered that this is also a very sinister passage. I remembered that there is a seminal crime for which the character reproaches himself: When his daughter is 11, he actually kisses her on the lips once. But my memory only held onto the poetic love aspect and completely obliterated the questionable, menacing side of Roth's words. So as unlikely a choice as this is, it added a kind of lyrical touch to my experience as a mother, based solely on how I chose to remember it."

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

"Very frequently there are certain lines of poetry that float into my head in the course of our family life. One line, for example, kept coming back to me after 9/11. It is from Auden's 'September 1, 1939': 'We must love one another or die.' I had both of my daughters in France, and the younger was born in 2000. We moved back to America shortly after my second was born. So my life as a mother in America largely began in the shadow of 9/11. It felt like such an unsafe and embattled time. I would be changing my daughter, and I would think, 'Are you going to be allowed to survive to adulthood?' I had this feeling with my family—all you have are the bonds of love. But in fact, that line is about everybody, too. It has wider implications.

"And then Matthew Arnold's poem 'Dover Beach' also has a sense of regret, a sense of the world gone amok. It's about the decline of faith in the modern, industrialized world. It is also about the importance of holding onto love in an otherwise hostile world. This line comes to me often: 'Ah love, let us be true to one another!' I feel that toward my husband. These family ties are our bulwark against a hostile world."