Name: My Work
ISBN: 9780811234719

Olga Ravn

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.

My Work

This is how I feel when I’m doing mundane collections work at the Benton

Clark Louis

And I feel how, here, by the clothesline, I become invisible to the world but clear to myself

When I got pregnant, wrote Anna, I became obsessed with averageness. I wanted to give birth to an average child. Of an average height and weight. With an average number of fingers and toes. This was how I would protect the child against death.

this book is incredibly sorrowful at times but it is really amusing here and there. 

Like?????? Every other line is incredible. I love this book so so so much

When Adam named everything in the Garden of Eden, was he in fact doing the work of a housewife?

I’m so sad and come to think of it, I don’t even know what qualifications I have.”

When Marx wrote that work should be outsourced to machines so the worker could instead write poetry in the morning, who did he imagine would change the diapers?

I told Aksel I was afraid my writing was too pretentious, and he assured me: "The last thing you need to worry about is being pretentious, Anna." Compliment or insult?

This coming from a man who pronounces Paris without an s.

It’s hard to imagine these feelings never leaving.

…Anna expected to be diagnosed with a grave chronic illness and simultaneously thrown out for suffering from nothing but a weakness of the soul.

It is a quote from Novalis, but the way it’s inserted into the book is incredibly beautiful and made my chest well. 

the poem heals / the wound inflicted by reason

a beautiful and heart wrenching amalgamation of ruminations on being a writer and a mother. Clever and witty and most importantly honest.

Amna A.

The author uses her own experiences of struggling with identity as both a mother and a writer, and is refreshingly honest about postpartum anxiety and depression. She reflects on her experience through essays, poetry, letters and personal journals. To further examine the experience of a mother struggling to balance early motherhood and a writing career, she explores women who are authors "in spite of having children" vs "because they have children". She also criticises the romanticism of motherhood in literature, and society being unwelcoming towards the raw honesty of the physical and especially mental hardships that come with it. And so the author challenges the mainstream narrative on motherhood, 
"By writing it down on these pages, I relieve us both of the burden. Here I put all that is horrible about becoming a mother. Here I put the mystery, everything I don't understand. Here I put the loneliness, the distance to the child's father that came with this new life. So neither he nor the child, nor I, must carry it. This book will be a container, a vessel for what a mother is not allowed to be: torn, in doubt, distraught, unhappy."