Until I had my first child, and this is to my shame, I had little understanding of just how much mothers are hidden, their stories unspoken, even as they cross the street in plain sight. Like grief or falling in love, becoming a mother is an experience both ordinary and transformative. But alongside the sleeplessness and wonder, the extent to which it can be profoundly destabilising can come as a shock. Almost twenty years on from Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work and Anne Enright's Making Babies comes a frank, funny and fearless exploration of what it means to become a mother that confronts the psychological shifts that can overturn a woman's sense of self. It aims to break the silence around the emotional turmoil that having a child can unleash and asks why motherhood is at once so venerated and so undervalued.Marianne Levy tells the real story of being a mother in the modern world. Bold, humane and uncompromising, she writes with dazzling honesty about love and loss, rage and pain, heartache and joy. This is a book that mothers will be glad to have read - and will need everyone else to read, too.