A Life's Work: On Becoming A Mother

Author: Rachel Cusk

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $33.00 AUD
  • : 9780312311308
  • : Pan Macmillan
  • : St Martin's Press
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  • : 0.295
  • : March 2003
  • : 216mm X 140mm X 15mm
  • : United States
  • : 32.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Rachel Cusk
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : 306.8743
  • : 228
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Barcode 9780312311308
9780312311308

Description

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.

Reviews

âI love reading it, and found it fascinating, but I also found it dangerous. An incitement to riot...itâs an extraordinary piece of work and the writing is utterly beautiful...I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition.â âEsther Freud, author of" Hideous Kinky"

Author description

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