About the Author

Karen Kleiman is a well-known international maternal mental-health expert with over thirty-five years of experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, and writer. As an advocate and author of several groundbreaking books on postpartum depression and anxiety, her pioneering work has influenced personal and professional populations within the perinatal mental health community for decades. In 1988, Karen founded The Postpartum Stress Center, a treatment and training facility for prenatal and postpartum depression/anxiety disorders where she treats individuals and couples.

Molly McIntyre is an artist, illustrator, and animator living in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. Her work has been featured in the upcoming Netflix series Worn Stories, the book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts (Karen Kleiman, Familius), Bitch magazine, Everyday Feminism, Scary Mommy, and Psychology Today, and shown in exhibitions throughout the US and in Japan. 

 

Reviews

"This brilliant little book is chock-full of truths about the common realities of new motherhood. Once again, Kleiman says what we are all thinking—and too scared to say out loud. With comic relief, she puts it all out there!"- Catherine Birndorf, MD co-founder of The Motherhood Center of New York

"Learning about important subjects doesn’t always have to come in a textbook! Karen Kleiman has done it again. A powerful and relevant book to inform, to enlighten, and to treasure. This book should be read by every new mother, everyone who loves her, and every single healthcare provider."
- Diana Barnes, PsyD, editor of Women’s Reproductive Mental Health Across the Lifespan
 
"With humor and honesty, this illustrated self-help guide for new mothers offers an alternative to the earnestness of more traditional books on the subject. Eschewing the typical advice and information about baby care, the comics and information are entirely devoted to the experiences of women who have recently given birth. Difficult topics such as postpartum depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder get frank discussion, and the tone is reassuring without diminishing the potential seriousness of these issues. The illustrations are sunny and relatable, depicting women of diverse ethnicities and body types. The format is especially effective in conveying, through speech and thought balloons, the differences between what new mothers might say and what they are really feeling... New mothers will find this work a reassuring companion in a challenging time. (Mar.)"
- Publishers Weekly
 
"Illustrated and inspirational, Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts takes a conversational yet serious graphic novel approach to helping mothers cope with their darkest mothering moments. Karen Kleiman, co-author of This Isn’t What I Expected, writes with the most empathetic of pens, and the winning illustrations of Molly McIntyre convey a fantastic amount of data and emotion in this flawless project."
- Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews

"...a brilliant guide for new moms."
-BookPage
 

 "a gold standard in terms of normalizing conversations around the intrusive thoughts that so often come along with new motherhood."—Paige Bellenbaum, Romper.com