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A Life's Work
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother | Rachel Cusk
7 posts | 8 read | 14 to read
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.
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AnneCecilie
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While pregnant with her second child, Cusk decides to write how it was to be pregnant and become a mother. Cusk gives the unfiltered truth according to her, and not everyone took lightly to that.

What I took away from is was that it doesn‘t matter how many books you read about this, your pregnancy and child will not the fit what‘s written. And how hard that can be to figure things out and how lonely it can being alone with a child.

AnneCecilie And how a mother‘s work never end. She ends when the kids are a couple of years and the work is just beginning. #2001 #192025 @Librarybelle 4mo
Librarybelle I‘ve yet to read anything by Cusk! 4mo
youneverarrived Ah this sounds right up my street! 3mo
53 likes1 stack add3 comments
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AnneCecilie
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I suppose it would be good for her to meet other babies. As far as I knew, my daughter believed that she was the only one of her kind. I worried that the truth might come as something of a shock.

(Writing about attending toddler group)

sarahbarnes 😂😂😂 4mo
Aimeesue 😂😂😂 4mo
34 likes2 comments
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Kazzie
A Life's Work | Rachel Cusk
Pickpick

I love her honest description of motherhood. At times frustrating, boring, terrifying, and yet she describes her lover for her daughter so fiercely

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Canadian.Reads
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Reviewers who are mothers called this 'laugh out loud' funny. As someone peering around the corner at motherhood myself, I am leaning more towards it being slightly horrifying and at times as riveting as a thriller. Cusk is a fantastic writer and her speaking to the issue of children and who looks after them as being profoundly political, captured a lot of my thoughts in a way I couldn't put together before. ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

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KaraDunn
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A gorgeously written memoir about the bewildering transition from person to parent.

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8little_paws
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A memoir of Cusk's pregnancy and the early years of her life as a mother, her writing is riveting, raw, and unforgettable. Her way of putting her thoughts and experiences into the words she chooses is so unexpected, and delightful. Recommended for Ferrante fans, different topics but a similar sense of voice and style.

60 likes3 stack adds
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8little_paws
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I picked this up to see if I'd like her style before committing to her new trilogy, and let me say I'll read anything she writes.

49 likes1 stack add