Good Morning America has tapped Ashley Audrain’s The Push as the newest selection for its book club.
Audrain’s novel, her first, follows Blythe, a woman struggling to raise her troubled daughter, who now lives with her father and his new wife. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book “a novel written for and about mothers but not for the faint of heart; it offers no easy answers.”
“The Push is a novel about the expectations and fears of motherhood and whether we can ever really know the people we hold the closest, and if we can recover from the scars of our past,” Audrain said. “This is a novel that will open up conversations about motherhood that you never had before.”
Audrain, a former publicity director at Penguin Canada, told Toronto Life that marketing a book during the coronavirus pandemic presented some problems.
“No book tour, but this story is about a mother in isolation, and I hope that idea resonates with readers,” she said. “You could argue that there’s never been a harder time to be a parent of young children. We’re always told that it takes a village to raise a child, and essentially everyone’s village has been taken away.”
The GMA book club started in 2019. Past picks have included Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and Bryan Washington’s Memorial.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
