"A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother" by Rachel Cusk (Fourth Estate , 2008)

The sections are more thematic (e.g. about feeding) than chronological. She also adds what came to mind from novels - War and Peace, etc. ("Motherhood for Emma Bovary is an alias, an identity she occasionally assumes in her career as an adulterer" p.89). In the introduction she writes

• with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and even then only mothers who, like me, find the experience so momentous that reading about it has a strangely narcotic effect (p.3)
• I am certain that my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful (p.4)

My favourite section was the visit to the toddler group starting on p.168. Here are some extracts from other sections -

• The baby "is at once victim and autocrat" p.30
• "It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I love, someone I can't believe has gone" p.50
• "it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life" p.65
• "Brief pauses begin to appear in the score of motherhood, silences like the silences between album tracks, surrounded by sound but silences nonetheless. In them I begin to glimpse myself, briefly, like someone walking past my window. The sight is a shock, like the sight of someone thought dead." p.207
• "When the evening comes I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin" p.107
• "with the baby's birth a lifetime of vanity vanished into thin air. Like gestures of love that abruptly cease, I come to value my habit of self-adornment only with its disappearance: it was proof that I cared, and without it I feel a private sense of sad resignation, as if some optimistic gloss has been stripped from my life. Sometimes I think back to that history of caring - as a self-conscious child, an anxious teenager, an attempted woman of fashion - amazing that it could have ended so precipitately, for it wa in a modest way a civilisation, a city built from the days of my life. The last chapter of this history - pregnancy - was as vivid as any other: it contained no hint of an ending, no clue that things were about to change. It is as if some disaster has occurred which has wiped my out" p.133

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway
• Ian Sansom (Cusk's work is characteristically elegant in diction ... rather than attempting to explain these experiences, she merely admits to them as a huge confused mass of thoughts. She is articulate, but she appears often to be talking to herself; she feels indignant, but comes across as petty and irritable.)