Television for Women
by Danit Brown
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Pub Date Jun 24 2025 | Archive Date Jul 01 2025
Melville House Publishing | Melville House
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Description
Estie isn’t sure she likes being eight months pregnant. She isn’t even sure she likes her husband anymore, especially after he hid that he’s been fired from his job. Hello parenthood! Goodbye life as Estie imagined it! Now, she’s stranded and bloated and alone. Her cat is not a people person, and on top of it all, her best friend has been ignoring her calls ever since Estie told her about the baby.
After Estie gives birth, she begins to suspect that all the stories she’s been told about motherhood might not be true. Having a child does not “complete” her. And that mythical connection with her baby? Well, she’s still waiting. In fact, Estie fears she is destined to end up like her own mother—divorced and crying in the bathroom while her daughter stands outside the door and wonders if she’s okay.
Startlingly honest and unsentimental, Television for Women explores the realities of life postpartum, the demands children make on women’s identities and relationships—and the desperate lengths someone might go to in order to reclaim the person she once was.
Advance Praise
"I can think of no other novel that depicts the first months of parenthood and its disillusionments so honestly and with so much humor and pathos and clarity. An engrossing, hilarious read." —Rebecca Makkai, author of the New York Times bestseller I Have Some Questions for You
"Danit Brown has managed to write a post-partum page-turner. Television For Women is an intimate examination of female friendship, motherhood, longing and regret, all told with wonderfully dark humor. A brutal and delightful read." —Kiley Reid, author of the New York Times bestseller Such a Fun Age
"Fans of Rachel Cusk and Rachel Yoder, watch out: This knockout of a novel will have you up all night, frantically turning pages. Rarely have I felt so seen by a depiction of early motherhood, of the maternal mental load, of the cataclysmic changes women undergo when an infant enters their lives. I loved it and can't stop thinking or talking about it." —Joanna Rakoff, author of internationally bestselling book, My Salinger Year
"If there is a canon for writing about postpartum depression, I would like to nominate Danit Brown’s Television For Women and then put it on the top of the list. I started to read this crazy thrill ride of a novel before bed and then stayed up until the middle of the night, not stopping until I was done." —Marcy Dermansky, author of Hot Air
"A sheer pleasure of a novel, written with all the gruesome grace and grit of a trusted friend with whom you can be completely, unselfconsciously honest. What a rare and precious thing in life, let alone literature." —Elisa Albert, author of Book of Dahlia
"Television for Women is a book you don’t read so much as devour, so vividly alive on the page that you’re sucked in and held there by forces beyond your control. It’s a maternity thriller: impossible to put down because of the pitch perfect prose, and the feeling you get that someone out there totally understands you, that as bad as everything is, it’s all going to somehow be miraculously okay. Readers are going to be eternally grateful to Danit Brown for finding them just when they needed her most and giving them the perfect thing they didn’t even know they needed." —Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781685891831 |
PRICE | $19.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 272 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews

I have never read anything that captured the raw, unrelenting reality of early motherhood with such brutal accuracy. Television for Women doesn't flinch at all. It doesn't sugarcoat. It doesn't swerve or dodge, offering the copout or platitude that everything will be okay. It just... sits in the mess of it -- the exhaustion, the resentment, the rumination, the identity crisis, and the quiet terror that this is forever. Danit Brown "goes there" with a level of honesty that almost feels transgressive. It's not the picture of motherhood you find on those IG pages where they pretend to be honest about the difficulty ("you're doing your best mama!"), it's realer and deeper than that.
It's painful, yes. But it's also stunning in its precision. There were moments in this book that cut so deeply that they transported me right back to those early postpartum days -- ones that most of us barely speak about because it's impossible to square them with the joy and love you're supposed to be feeling. Brown tells the truth anyways. And by doing that, she doesn't just write a HELL of a debut, she makes space for those who have lived it. And I just have so much respect for that.
And then, right there at the end, she gives us the most perfect, poignant, and accurate summation of how the fog starts to lift: "Even with the benefit of hindsight, Estie couldn't pinpoint the moment she started feeling better. She'd been miserable to begin with, and then, one day, she wasn't miserable anymore." That is EXACTLY how it happened for me, and I can't believe how simply and accurately she summed up one of the most stunning emotional transformations of my life in two sentences. No grand epiphany, no one coming to save you, no sweeping transformation, just a slow, imperceptible shift until, one day, it isn't so heavy.
I cannot overstate how much respect I have for what Brown has done here. THIS NOVEL WILL NOT BE FOR EVERYONE, but for those who see something of their own experience here, this will hit so different.
Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for the advance copy, and for Danit Brown for writing this.
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