MOM, UNFILTERED
Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom through Motherhood
Published by Bloomsbury
Mom, Unfiltered is a deeply personal examination of the dire state of our maternal and postpartum care for mothers.
For expecting and new parents, too often the care is so focused on a healthy baby that the mother's physical and mental needs are overlooked. Mothers face intense pressure to have the perfect birth plan, breastfeed with ease, and immediately bond with their baby. Unfortunately, these expectations can lead to anxiety, depression, and overwhelm. But it doesn't have to be that way.
In Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood, Leah Kim explores her own pregnancy and early motherhood experience as a person of the global majority, the ways society fails new mothers, the mental health struggles of expecting and new mothers, the systemic neglect in care for mothers with marginalized identities, and how motherhood can be the inspiration for getting help and healing.
Mom, Unfiltered is profoundly personal and brutally honest, yet it is ultimately deeply hopeful. It is about survival and growth, an invitation to move beyond our current social, cultural, and familial realities to support mothers in a meaningful way-physically, mentally, and spiritually.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT MOM, UNFILTERED
“Courageously written; cathartic and healing to read. Kim invites readers into some of the most devastating, unspoken experiences of motherhood with candor, vulnerability, and hope. Through her personal story and socio-political analyses, Kim makes an irrefutable case for how our society fails mothers, while drawing us a map to collective healing and home.”
― Bianca Mabute-Louie, author of Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century
“Leah Kim is a change agent who writes like someone trying to remake the world in the image of progress. Her sentences don't just imagine change; they insist on it. Until the reader, too, begins to believe in the possible.”
― Frederick Joseph, New York Times bestselling author of Patriarchy Blues and This Thing of Ours
“Mom, Unfiltered is medicine for these times. It is a call for honesty, repair, and collective care. Leah gives voice to realities of motherhood that are often kept secret, makes meaning out of suffering, and offers a way through to healing. By weaving her own story with the experiences and wisdom of other mothers, Leah has created a tapestry of truths that will set us all free.”
― Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy
“Mom, Unfiltered level-sets the playing field for parents, guardians, coparents, and social justice warriors alike by crystallizing what this moment needs: collective care, love and community.”
― Joél Leon, author of the 2025 Gotham Book Prize-nominated Everything and Nothing at Once
“Mom, Unfiltered is such a refreshing and honest look at motherhood. Leah Kim isn't afraid to tackle the tough stuff-racism in healthcare, generational trauma, and mental health-while reminding us to hold on to faith and grace through it all.”
― Anita Kopacz, bestselling author of Shallow Waters
“Mom, Unfiltered is the radical motherhood narrative that we all need for our collective healing. All humans, regardless of whether or not they ever choose to give birth or raise a child, would benefit from reading this book.”
― Yumi Sakugawa, author of There is No Right Way to Meditate
“Leah's brilliant vulnerability in Mom, Unfiltered gently unravels the shame woven into motherhood without losing sight of the systems that distort our path. She makes space for our imperfections, shares her own inherited trauma and generational patterns, and pulls no punches, calling out capitalism, racism, and white supremacy. I laughed out loud, teared up more than once, and finished feeling held by this beautiful confessional. It reminds us of our precious humanity and the divine right to evolve.”
― Ashley Simpo, writer, doula, and mom
“While motherhood is so often publicly championed, Leah takes us through the gritty reality: it remains under-resourced and misunderstood, especially for the marginalized. In Mom, Unfiltered, Leah unravels the myths that abound, removing old dressing, bringing new gauze and needed air. Through soaring memoir and sobering research and history, Leah points us towards a liberated and joyful renewal of the role of mother and all the ways we need each other through its arduous labor, birth, and on. I am moved by Leah's harrowing and heartrending work that has opened me repeatedly to a better vision of support, as the role of parenting requires all of us and more of us.”
― J.S. Park, BCC, hospital chaplain and author of As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve
“Mom, Unfiltered is essential reading not just for mothers and birthing people but also for their partners, loved ones and caregivers. We are so under-equipped when it comes to birth and so much information is purposely obscured from us about our bodies. Had I not gone through full-spectrum doula training, especially one that placed a heavy emphasis on Birth Justice, I would have been so much less prepared for my own birth. Mom, Unfiltered is a crash course in what I learned during that doula training. The racial disparities among birthing people and how they are treated by the medical system, the de-stigmatization of not having "the perfect birth", and the basic tenet that we are allowed to advocate for our own needs and that we deserve to be heard and believed when we name what those needs are. Leah Kim's book is nothing short of revolutionary. Because, as Leah points out, the ways we care for birthing people, for children, and for the most vulnerable in society is a microcosm of the whole.”
― Poppy Liu, actress, activist, mother, and doula
“Mom, Unfiltered is an essential read for every young woman navigating life and identity in America. With raw honesty and lyrical grace, it captures the universal journey of motherhood, both its vulnerability and its quiet triumphs. More than a story, it's a fearless self-investigation that balances emotional depth, heartbreak, and healing in equal measure.”
― Naley by Nature, filmmaker and Dazed 100 Changemaker