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3.5 

A Life's Work

By Rachel Cusk
A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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133 Reviews

3.5
“A raw memoir of a woman's first experience of motherhood. There are many depressing angles that highlight the cruelty and hidden world of infants, with this book having a curiously uplifting ending where she seems to commit to being 'only a mother' and things get better? This book was a strange combination of the protagonist constantly thinking “this has changed forever” and then things changing again - whether back again or further different. I did feel a lot of it was a harsh perspective - a desperation of Cusk to keep her younger self, an aversion to change. I read this during Covid Isolation, and lockdown itself almost mirrored Cusk's perception of young parenthood. Even without being a mother, the big changes in my life at the time taught me to let go of old selves and accept change, a similar journey to Cusk in the book. This book made me wonder how I will be as a parent - there’s a moment where Cusk asks what is the good side to it, besides love. It made me reconsider a previouslt held notion of a rather rosy depiction concept of motherhood, but I didn’t find the book worthy of the scathing reviews I learned about prior to reading. While Cusk definitely has a negative view on motherhood, I also felt it was honest and mostly fair. Well written and insightful, worthy of 4 stars but I can’t seem to validate 5 from it's contents being so challenging to my own beliefs and hopes.”

About Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place; the trilogy Outline, Transit, Kudos; the essay collection Coventry; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes (winner of the Whitbread Award), The Temporary, The Country Life (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Lucky Ones, In the Fold, Arlington Park, and The Bradshaw Variations.

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