For all the children out there who think their moms aren’t up to snuff, let me suggest that your Mother’s Day reading includes books on my list of worst literary mothers (for the mothers out there who feel they aren’t appreciated enough by their children, make one of these books your Mother’s Day gift to them!). You might want to reconsider ….

Medea by Euripedes – Does it get any worse than killing your own sons as revenge against their father? Perhaps literature’s original bad mama, she set the bar high.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – Emma Bovary’s romanticism doesn’t extend to motherhood. Her suicide, soon followed by her husband’s death, leaves her daughter alone, penniless and forced to work in a mill.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck — Cathy Ames (later known as Kate Albey) is this epic’s Satan, Jezebel, and Eve all rolled up into one. Running a brothel aside, she’s also responsible for the deaths of many people including her parents. Add to that, she slept with her brother-in-law, shot her husband and abandoned her twin sons (after failing to abort them with a knitting needle). Even after committing suicide, she further inflamed the Cain and Abel relationship between her sons by leaving all of her possessions to only one.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – No matter how sorry we may feel for Charlotte Haze’s bovine, clueless existence, her desire for what she imagines is the fine life leads her to bring pedophile Humbert Humbert into her nubile adolescent daughter’s life. Disaster for all but, somehow, Nabokov elicits absurd humor in this tale.

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – There are overbearing mothers in every culture but Sophie Portnoy is every cliché of the overbearing Jewish mother, rolled into one. Her punishment is the son she has to mother.

Carrie by Stephen King – Here’s what happens when your mother is a fanatic, in this case a religious fanatic. Margaret White’s warped view that it is sinful to be a woman dooms her daughter and nearly an entire town before bringing on her own awful demise (for which we find ourselves cheering).

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews — Creepy Corinne Dollanganger leaves her kids with her own terrible and abusive mother, then feeds them arsenic so she can keep her inheritance. The epitome of the creepy mom.

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin – Once you’ve procreated with your twin brother, it’s doesn’t matter how much you say you love your kids when the one you most support turns out to be psychopathic, animal-torturing monster.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver presents the only mother on my list created by a female author (yes, Lionel is a woman). Kevin had as little chance in life as his victims. Before he became a teenage mass murderer, he endured Eva Khatchadourian, one of the most depraved mothers in literature. Nature? Nurture? Chilling!

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn – The epitome of self-denial and self-indulgence, Eleanor Melrose is victimized before becoming the victimizer of her son through omission and commission.

For younger readers and the child in all of us:

Coraline by Neil Gaiman –This is a great way to instill an appreciation of mothers by their children. “Think another mother will be better than me? Let me read you the story of Coraline!” Buttons for eyes! Buttons for eyes! A dark novella with a lesson for all of us who thought at some point in childhood that our parents were less than perfect.

Stranger than fiction:

Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford – Can this list not contain a memoir about having Joan Crawford for a mother? All the more horrific because this is non-fiction. But it is a warning to parents that your children will probably have the last word on your parenting.