Novelist Rachel Cusk gives a frank, unsentimental account of pregnancy, birth and the first year of her daughter's life, from colic and sleepless nights to the loss of her former self. Interweaving readings of novels and childcare manuals, it is a landmark of the modern motherhood memoir.
Books mentioned in A Life's Work (16)
The Bad Mother by James Hillman: “James Hillman, ‘The Bad Mother’ (epigraph)”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “‘Natasha had married in the early spring of 1813,’ writes Tolstoy … at the end of War and Peace”
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: “Instead he wrote Anna Karenina, excavating the woman extant in the mother”
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: “Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth asks the question of what a woman is if she is not a wife, a mother”
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett: “Poor Mary Lennox, child-heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.”
The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning: “When the baby sleeps I intermittently read Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune”
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: “In Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary sends her baby daughter to live with a wet-nurse”
Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “I read again Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost At Midnight’.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: “In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the child Jane’s cruel Aunt Reed locks her in the Red Room”
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence: “‘From the first’, writes D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow, the baby stirred in the young father a deep, strong emotion”
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust: “‘When a man is asleep,’ writes Proust in Swann’s Way, ‘he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours’”
Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber: “Dr Richard Ferber, in Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, relates the case of Betsy”
Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock: “She gives me Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care.”
Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach: “I go to the bookshop myself and purchase Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach.”
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: “an enactment of privilege derived from the pages of Brideshead Revisited”
Dr. Seuss's ABC by Seuss: “a book that is too old for her, by Dr Seuss. It is about the alphabet… Oscar’s only ostrich oiled an orange owl today”