Synopses & Reviews
The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion.
In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusks account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.
Review
"Cusk has written something fine and beautiful; the precision of her language and the depth of her insights lend such homey, unremarkable subjects as breastfeeding and engaging a babysitter an almost shocking newness. Motherhood is frequently a target for the broadest kind of humor, but although Cusk's book is sometimes very funny, she doesn't play for yucks, and this restraint brings a dignity to the subject and the experience that most of the other books lack....That A Life's Work seems not to be finding its audience is a pity; I can't imagine that anyone who is both a reader and a mother will be unmoved by it." Caitlin Flanagan, Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Review
"Clever novelists like these are using their art to disprove any notions of an evolutionary plug on a woman's ability to write and, at last, transforming their ghetto-world into a place where one can feel oneself think." Rachel Polonsky, Evening Standard (UK)
Review
"A powerful, often funny account of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering that doesn't gloss over the pain, mystery, and confusionbut does celebrate the wonder....Mothers and prospective mothers will find the experience as told here dauntingas well as intact, true, and whole." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother is multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk's honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion.
In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk's account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.
"Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary--sort of Apocalypse Baby Now...A Life's Work is wholly original and unabashedly true."--The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk's honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood.
Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
"Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary--sort of Apocalypse Baby Now . . . A Life's Work is wholly original and unabashedly true." --The New York Times Book Review
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk's funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself.
An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.
About the Author
Rachel Cusk is the author of three novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, and The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. A Life's Work is her first work of nonfiction.