A Life's Work; On Becoming a Mother

by Rachel Cusk

• ISBN13: 9780312269876
• ISBN10: 0312269870
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-04-06
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Rachel Cusk is the author of the acclaimed novels The Country Life and Saving Agnes. She lives in England.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(10)
Forty Weeks	11	(34)
Lily Bart's Baby	45	(14)
Colic and Other Stories	59	(14)
Loving, Leaving	73	(20)
Motherbaby	93	(18)
Extra Fox	111	(14)
Hell's Kitchen	125	(18)
Help	143	(16)
Don't Forget to Scream	159	(16)
A Valediction to Sleep	175	(20)
Breathe	195	(10)
Heartburn	205