A Life's Work
On Becoming a Mother
ISBN10: 0312311303
ISBN13: 9780312311308
Paperback
224 Pages
$18.00
CA$24.50
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.
Reviews
Praise for A Life's Work
"[I] found it fascinating, but I also found it dangerous. An incitement to riot . . . it's an extraordinary piece of work and the writing is utterly beautiful . . . I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition."—Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
If at any point in my life I had been able to find out what the future held, I would always have wanted to know whether or not I would have children. More than love, more than work, more than length of life or...