But I think it is more likely that to feel such pain is so fundamentally different to reading about it. Both parents can work and employ a nanny or childminder, or sometimes each can work a shorter week and spend some days at home and some at work. She studied English at Oxford and published her first novel Saving Agnes when she was twenty six, and its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. I've been trying to read something which will really prove insightful, not some nonsensical preachy drivel dished out by someone who is telling me what it "ought" to be like.

As unmarried, no child reader, middle section was hard to get through as it felt exhausting to read. Yet I had experienced it, in a way: it was part of what I had found intolerable in the public culture of motherhood, the childcare manuals and the toddler groups, the discourse of domestic life, even the politics of birth itself.

How do parents, particularly the stay at home parent, survive the loneliness and exhaustion of the first year of a baby's life ? My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.

I have a two and a half year old and another on the way in the new year, and had heard that this book was a negative dirge.

Instead, he wrote Anna Karenina, excavating the woman extant in the mother and demonstrating her power to destroy, for motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence. The memoir proved a breakthrough for Cusk, leading her toward the autobiographical fiction for which she is now best known. The whole tone just irritated me and so now l do understand what other people who read this book felt when they read it.

Although she has decided she wants to be a mother, she is apprehensive about the dramatic upheaval a child will bring. It would have been more pleasant for them inside: the imposition was so direct that I wrote as quickly as I could.It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. Rachel Cusk is the author of nine novels, three non-fiction works, a play, and numerous shorter essays and memoirs.

The book was well written and interesting in terms of describing infant development and the impact of initial relationships as seen in this book from the mother's perspective. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. In ‘A Life’s Work’ novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of this story, an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Just see what happens next, day by day, trusting in the relationship of mother and child above all as the main incoming on a need-to-know basis.As such motherhood provides a unique window to the history of our sex, but its glass is easily broken. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. The most famous of her novels, 2014’s Outline, was shortlisted for the Folio, Goldsmiths, and Baileys Prizes. Also she dwells on the negative and devotes very little of the book to the positive, wonderful side of motherhood. In a brief introduction, Cusk notes that the memoir was written just six months after her first daughter’s birth and while Cusk was pregnant with her second daughter.