I greatly enjoyed this wild and free-wheeling book, which tells a layered and thought-provoking story of motherhood and artistic expression. The 'work' in the book encompasses a great deal- motherhood, labour, toil, creative pursuits and struggling under capitalism, all while avoiding feeling like a treatise. Instead, this is a rare example of a book using fiction to truly explore what non-fiction would struggle to.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Work is a gorgeously crafted blend of poetry and prose, delving into the psychological aftermath of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the complex and emotionally exhausting process of becoming a parent and navigating the minefield of raising a child.

The novel is fractured and confusing at times but ultimately a very powerful.study of a woman struggling to cope, obsessing over breastfeeding, questioning whether she even loves her child at all, and fighting against the contrasting opinions of her husband.

I really enjoyed My Work, though I am not usually a reader of poetry at all, I found it was a beautiful accompaniment to the extremely well-written narrative.

"Who wrote this book? I did, of course. Although I’d like to convince you otherwise. Let’s agree right now that someone else has written it. Another woman, entirely unlike me. Let’s call her Anna."

And so we dive into the chaotic jumble of pages that 'Anna' has left behind, written over the course of three years - from her pregnancy to the birth of her son and his first 2,5 years. Anna suffers from anxiety and the life changes motherhood brings are extremely difficult for her to cope with. The practical choices alone (which diapers, which creams, which foods, which clothes) are overwhelming, let alone the bigger questions. What is my role? What remains of my self? How can I maintain a working and writing life? Can I be a good mother and long to work at the same time? Is my relationship made for this change?

Husband Aksel acts as if he is modern and supportive, but is stuck in preconceptions.

I found some of the doubts are very relatable, others much less so. But no matter how much it resonates, the book is an impressive achievement. It is a non linear collage of different forms and styles (poetry, letters, notes, anecdotes), but in very accessible and vivid style.

Highly recommended for everyone, but especially for parents of young children.

Ravn's mixed media wandering through the mind of a mother in various points in her early motherhood journey.

The wanderings go back and forth and go round and round like the thoughts in her protagonists head. It's like thoughts spiralling all over each other. She creates this disjointedness the mother feels. A mother who never names her child, it is always the child, the boy. Is this her way of keeping him separate from her life?

Ravn touches how when a woman becomes a mother she metamorphises into something different then before. Her body changes to build the child, to birth the child, to feed the child, to accommodate the child. Her life changes as well, taking care of the child is the priority, what remains is thinly spread out to cover her health, her finances, her personal life and needs, her loves, her work, her art, her individuality. She no longer remains a woman but becomes a mother and this causes conflict both internal and external. Finding a balance here is what each woman/mother tries for with varying degrees of success.

I felt that the book could have been tighter. Ravn's is so good in making us see Anna's perspective but once we see it, we go for a repeat journey and another repeat journey etc and I did not enjoy that. I much prefer her The Employees.

An ARC kindly provided by author/publisher via Netgalley.

Having read quite a few novels on the topic of pregnancy, early motherhood and post-partum depression, I must admit this book is the first one that utilises the experimental format of different narrative styles to represent the mental state of the protagonist. However, this is also the reason why I found "My Work" challenging to interact with and I think some readers may share this experience.

What I appreciated about "My Work" were the social observations outside the topic of parenting, for example how the place of living affects how people carry themselves, which is reflected in their clothes or pastimes.

I have read several books this year about the experience of first time motherhood and My Work is by far the most superior. Using a mix of forms, the author navigates pregnancy, birth, post partum depression, new motherhood and how it impacts of her life, her relationships and her time. From medical notes to poetry this is a all encompassing account. I will admit there were elements of this book that went over my head ( the links to another authors work) but it didn't take from my reading experience.

I loved this mishmash of styles it so beautifully reflects the chaos of this time in a woman[s life. Intimate, honest, accurate and fascinating. It made me reflect on past experiences and brought me back in time.

A wonderful immersive read.

I found this one a tricky read - lots of shifting prose and tone, describing the protagonists experience with pregnancy, post partum depression, and motherhood.

Whilst it was beautifully written, It was just too heavy for me at the moment, which may be more of a reflection on me than the author! But I do think that women struggling with the reality of becoming a mother would appreciate this book!

An unnamed narrator finds her journal from when she was pregnant with her first child, which is a blank period in her mind - a blank period she named Anna, to differentiate herself from this new mother. Through journal entries, transcripts, patient records, and poems, the narrator reconstructs her experience of becoming a mother, and her attempts to deal with her anxiety.

I’m not a parent, but this was one of a few books I felt really got at motherhood: the strangeness of it, the overwhelming feelings, the grossness of the body. It does toe the line of placing the Western white woman experience as a universal one. Raven’s writing is excellent, and while I don’t think there was anything especially new in the motherhood discourse here, it was well-done, placed in communication with other writers (lots of great references) and done in a unique format. Excellent, again, from Ravn. .

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review!

This was my last pick for Women in Translation month and it was absolutely brilliant, one of my favourites of 2023 and one of the best books about motherhood I’ve ever read! It’s been translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith and they’ve done a stellar job, especially given the medical snippets and poetry throughout.

I’m not a mother and have no intentions of being one, but anyone who wants to come close to understanding what it is to be a mother should read My Work. Ravn exposes the incongruity of the stories we tell about motherhood and what it’s actually like to undergo such a radical process and come out the other side responsible for a human being. The protagonist Anna is struggling with postpartum depression, and the structure of the book is incredible in the way it reflects her scattered mental state.

Anna often is at odds with her partner Aksel, as she doesn’t believe he fully ‘gets’ what it is to be a mother. And it’s definitely true that most men are not shouldering the same amount of mental, emotional and physical labour a mother does when it comes to parenting. When preparing for a child it’s not men who are pummelled by the constant barrage of warnings and risks that could harm the future baby, things you’d never think of like hair dye and chemicals within mattress stuffing. A lot of Anna’s obsessive thoughts revolve around time and how it seems to slip away from her, something I related to hard as I’m constantly aware of and counting time. Ravn’s depiction of anxiety and depression is breathtaking.

I’ve read quite a lot of books about motherhood that don’t shy away from the nitty-gritty, but My Work takes the cake. I’ve never read a book which lists out times and details of Braxton Hicks, which talks about colostrum and all the other details regularly glossed over in media.

Anna is a writer, and Ravn draws on a lot of other women writers who have experiences of childbirth, pregnancy and motherhood to discuss what it means to be a mother and produce art.

Some of my favourite quotes (taken from an e-ARC):

‘Why am I trapped in the belief that writing about motherhood is shameful when I know that creating life where once there was none, creating flesh where once there was no flesh, is one of the most radical and outrageous things a person can do?’

‘Is telling a mother-to-be the story that upon the birth of her child she will feel indescribable happiness a way of giving shape to the shapeless? To put the formless event of birth into a form? And to call that happiness?’

‘The notion that one must sacrifice everything for the sake of art - that only in this way can it become sublime - implies that anyone who is forced to take care of others, to perform manual labour, cannot become an artist.
If you have family members who are sick, children to raise, expenses to pay through work that's unrelated to art, you cannot be an artist.’

‘And each child comes into the world as themselves, through their own channel. And I became, I was, sheer channel, nothing but a channel of flesh for the child. And all my walls screamed with pain when he was born. And what was I then, after his arrival, but a used channel? A husk, a slough, discarded by a baby. The eyes moved away from me, they turned to the child. They took him into their arms. I'm still lying on the delivery table. I can't get out. Many years have gone by since then, but no one has noticed that the night they welcomed the child, I died, and what now walks around among them is not a human but the discarded channel for the child's arrival.’

‘I need to stop thinking that my husband can see all these things that need doing and instead understand that I alone read the apartment as a to-do list that needs completing to sustain the child’s standard of living.’

‘To give birth to a child is also to give birth to a future corpse, you make a death, have you ever thought about that?’ ‘Um, no’

DNF - I have enjoyed Ravn's work in the past but this book was difficult for me to engage with. The flow of the narrative felt similar to other pieces dealing with early motherhood & so left me feeling overall less enthused towards the approach this book took. Though this story could appeal to many readers I do think that a specific type of reader will be best placed to explore the nuanced & diverse realities & experiences that went into this story.

Where to begin with My Work. It is a spellbinding kaleidoscope of a novel, frenetic and boundless while somehow also feeling claustrophobic. Ravn plays with form, time, and characterization to capture the experience of Anna's pregnancy and birth of her first child. Anna feels alienated from so much that she loves; her husband, her child, her own body, and her writing as her life shifts and her the fog of her anxiety descends over everything. To soothe herself, she begins to look at the knives in her kitchen a different way, writes frantic notes and poems in the third person, depersonalizes herself to allow her to continue living in the uncertain future of motherhood to a child she cannot protect and marriage to a man who will never truly understand her. Its as though her pregnancy, though joyous for a moment, becomes a trap that grows exponentially longer, bringing Anna further and further away from her work but also her life overall. Despite it all, the novel is not overly bleak or dark - Ravn balances the intensity of these feelings with the absurdity of the whole situation. I think the novel loses momentum at the end despite the form changes, however, I can understand this being an intentional play on the monotony of care amidst the sweet moments of love. I'd recommend for people with children, people who do not want children, and people who are considering having children - this was an awful and lovely look at a version of early motherhood that, despite support systems like psychological counselling and state mandated maternity leave, is still shockingly difficult.

Olga Ravn’s novel’s grounded in her own life and the postpartum depression that descended after the birth of her first child. But equally it’s an exploration of interactions between the label “mother” and deep-rooted, cultural mythologies and practices: raising questions about what Ravn’s called the “area between what you are and what you are told.” Heavily influenced by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Raven’s narrative unusually structured. Like Lessing’s it’s broken down into sections tackling themes from multiple angles, marked by disorientating time shifts – the only fixed point here is the moment of giving birth. Also, like Lessing, Ravn has more than one narrator, one who’s unnamed and her alter ego Anna – named after Lessing’s Anna Wulf. Anna’s a vehicle for expressing the unnamed narrator’s overwhelming sense of disintegration, the splitting off of parts of herself into discrete categories: writer, mother, wife, patient, woman. Ravn reflects these conflicting selves through a patchwork of genres from poetry to script to essay to journal to more conventional narrative, moving abruptly between forms – an experiment in representing experience that simultaneously highlights the near-impossibility of doing so.

Anna and the unnamed narrator – some version of Ravn herself – are in a relationship with a man, and give birth to a son. For both unnamed narrator and Anna, pregnancy reignites an earlier pattern of emotional and bodily discomfort, manifested through intense anxiety. These feelings become bound up with Anna’s thoughts about how she might be both rebelling against, and submitting to, the values of a society that’s preconditioned her for motherhood dating right back to her childhood doll play. A cultural emphasis on the primacy of motherhood as a form of creation clashes with Anna’s identity as a writer, an identity threatened by pressure to prioritise her child’s more immediate demands. Like Lessing’s Anna, Ravn’s Anna’s inner and outer worlds are cracking up –the outer world’s marked by violence, the rise of populists like Trump, and escalating climate change. When Anna and Aksel temporarily relocate from Denmark to Sweden, a new tension arises, leading to reflections on the self under capitalism, sparked by Stockholm’s wealthy residents whose identity is shaped by what they consume and projected through what they wear.

Interwoven with Anna and Ravn’s narrator’s experiences and observations is an alternative canon, tracing women’s experiences of motherhood back through authors from Mary Shelley to Unica Zurn to Margaret Attwood to Anne Boyer and Rachel Cusk. Women intent on connecting the personal/ individual with the collective and political. These goals are present in The Golden Notebook but Lessing’s net is wider, rooted in social and historical analysis informed by her particular brand of Marxism. I found Ravn’s political canvas harder to visualise, where Lessing’s producing vast, recognisable landscapes, Ravn’s often painting in hazy miniature.

I found Ravn’s book exceptionally absorbing, thought-provoking and often entertaining. Relationships between men and women here intrigued me, highlighted by the growing gulf between Anna and partner Aksel who competes with Anna for their child’s attention but feels free to step away whenever other pursuits beckon. Their setup's curiously dated in terms of housework and parenting styles. The persistence of certain, gendered expectations is central to the narrator’s and Anna’s concerns. Anna realises her exhausting, emotion work might be framed as essential but it's actually taken for granted, she searches for answers in theorists like Marx but finds he too is primarily invested in men. I thought it was interesting Ravn, and fictional Anna, ultimately take refuge in material associated with second-wave feminism: Lessing’s novel which was co-opted as a “feminist bible” and, for Anna, Susan Griffin’s 1978 essay on feminism and motherhood. I could see that Ravn’s partly using these references to resurrect concepts of domestic space as workplace and site of women’s unpaid labour. But I also found the links slightly troubling, perhaps because they reminded me of broader issues surrounding recent "motherhood" fiction which, like much of second-wave feminism, has all too often privileged the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Also even if unintentionally, this can appear to support troubling distinctions between the “conventionally-fertile, heterosexual mother” and those whose identity doesn’t fit that mould.

II’m a bit conflicted in what I thought of Olga Ravn’s latest novel My Work and I think my thoughts on it will definitely be influx for some time. I loved The Employees and it firmly cemented Ravn as one of my auto-buy authors. 

With labour being the central theme of The Employees, it is unpaid labour, in the form of motherhood, that is the central theme of My Work. Our narrator is both unnamed and is Anna; structurally, the novel reflects the scattered, jumbled nature of a new mother’s mind and its synthesis is the putting together of Anna’s notes at various stages in early motherhood and pregnancy. There’s also a gynaecological report and stage-like scripts from the narrators mental health group. In some of the more detached perspectives, the voice feels very like that of some of the employees in Ravn’s previous novel and it was pleasing to have that familiarity - also quite a feat considering that The Employees was translated by Martin Aitken whilst My Work was translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Ravn is also a poet and there are extensive sections in free verse poetry - a lot of which I really enjoyed but at times I found it so on the nose that it felt a little cringe.  

My Work has really contemporaneity to it through the inclusion of headlines from Danish newspapers. With our Danish narrator having a Swedish partner, when the family move to Sweden, our narrator is particularly unsettled, detached from her familiar environment. Here there are also some very enjoyable comments on the fashion differences between Denmark and Sweden.  

Our narrator is a writer and some of the most interesting sections are when the narrator is (trying to) dedicate herself to her writing during summer at the big man’s house. The feminist reading of Frankenstein is explored here as well as the lives of various Scandinavian authors throughout history who were also mothers.  

The main reason I have mixed feelings towards My Work is that some other novels dealing with the difficulties of motherhood (e.g. Elena Ferrante's La figlia oscura/The Lost Daughter and Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch) also came to mind which I found on the whole more effective than My Work. With My Work, Ravn certainly undertakes a commendably ambitious project - I think trying to view it in isolation I will come to appreciate it more.

I hadn’t read Danish poet/novelist Olga Ravn before, but when the publisher’s blurb described My Work as “a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood”, my interest was piqued. And having finished I can now report: This is definitely radical and honest, but as the (presumably autofictional) story of a writer suffering severe mental illness after the birth of her child — as an examination of the struggle to find the balance between writing and mothering, despite a partner who is also a writer and who fancies himself as a kind of mother to the child — there wasn’t much funny about this. Blending poetry, prose, diary entries, and countless references to the work of other mother-writers, this is a serious and literary work along the lines of Rachel Cusk and Doris Lessing, but there’s not a lot of laughs (and that’s not a criticism, just an observation for others who might be expecting something “funny”). A truly excellent, relatable, and provocative novel and I look forward to reading Ravn again.

Description:
Follows Anna, a writer and new mother, through pregnancy and up to 3 years after the birth of her first child. Very fragmented and told through various accounts, poems, stories, observations etc., with reference to lots of other articles and works.

Liked:
As someone who perhaps verges on pregnancy- and/or motherhood-phobic, this hit very close to home. This book is all about the pervasive lies told about motherhood: that the first time you lay eyes on your child should be the happiest moment of your life, that pain during childbirth is swiftly forgotten, that it is not permissible to talk or write about the child in a negative way for fear that it'll hurt them when they grow up, that it is absolutely unthinkable for a mother to put anything else (including herself) above her child's needs. The book paints a picture of an outrageous trap. I hated Aksel, the protagonist's husband, for being so blind to how utterly nullified Anna felt, and for being selfish enough to let it be her cross to bear: the whole thing made me anxious and upset… which is perhaps not pleasant, but did feel important/necessary.

Disliked:
Whilst I think this is an important topic and conversation to have, I wasn't a fan of the format. It's hard to criticise this as it does do a decent job of showing Anna's mental state, and in a book which is about how difficult it is to write, I can appreciate that this is a function of grabbing disparate moments and putting whatever down. However, I think this could have been a stronger and more persuasive book with a brutal edit. In particular, about half of the poetry is my least favourite form: basically prose split up into short, staccato lines, with repetition, and without any beauty/quirk of expression. For example: one of the therapists // asks who can // describe // what anxiety // feels like

Would recommend, but very tentatively: it’s not a fun read by any means. Would definitely recommend reading Ravn’s other book The Employees first, if you’ve not already.

A searing, harrowing and visceral read that I don't think I will ever forget.
Using a combination of prose, poems and notes, Anna records her anguish and depression during pregnancy and the first few years of her son’s life. She and her husband are possessive of the baby, with Anna banished from the apartment when her husband is off work on parental leave.
Anna rages at being a milk cow, forced to nurture a child. She rages about motherhood stealing her identity. Motherhood alters completely a woman's relationship with her husband. Anna fantasizes about suicide.
Eventually, after therapy, Anna finds her way back with literature and research. Having a baby is a woman's work, a purpose which society expects of us. The dolls we have as children prepare us for what's ahead. It's a feminist treatise on aspects
of motherhood that are scarcely ever talked about.