A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother [Paperback]

Rachel is obviously very bright and well read and struggles to come to terms with her new identity. Occasionally her writing shines with humor or insight. Usually she comes across as pompous, and disdainful of anyone else she comes into contact with - other mothers, health workers, nannies. She frequently quotes great literature which I suppose is meant to shed insights into facets of motherhood. Instead these smacked to me of self-importance and usually I struggled to see their relevance - it was more like they were there to say: "hey! I've read Coleridge/Jane Austen/Edith Wharton et al, I'm not just an "ordinary" mother".

Because the narrative is so internal, it felt very circular and increasingly tedious. About all that I can say that is positive about this book is that at least it's a quick read.

A better book covering similar ground - but with real humour and personal development - is "Operating Instructions" by Anne Lamott.

Cusk's account is a quick read, her prose very often elegant. She hits a number of nails squarely on the head--in her descriptions of the constant demands made on breastfeeding mothers, for example, or the drama and tension inherent in bringing a baby out into the public, or one's cautious anticipation of freedom when it looks like the kid may finally sleep. She talks about the parents' eventual containment in a single, safe room once the baby changes "from rucksack to escaped zoo animal," an alteration in lifestyle that expectant parents, reading the standard parenting books, would not likely anticipate. Cusk describes, perfectly, the "mess and endemic domestic chaos" of a child-occupied house, "which no amount of work appears to eradicate." And she details for the non-parent, wont to lie in of a Saturday morning, what weekends are like for parents: "What the outside world refers to as 'the weekend' is a round trip to the ninth circle of hell for parents.... You are woken on a Saturday morning at six or seven o'clock by people getting into your bed. They cry or shout loudly in your ear. They kick you in the stomach, in the face."

Cusk is at her best when describing parenthood in scenes such as the above. Less successful are the more philosophical passages of the book (the female is "a world steeped in its own mild, voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear, or to a whole realm of existence both past and present that grows more individuated and indeterminate and inarticulatable as time goes by") and the strange inclusion and discussion of parenthood-related literary passages culled, for example, from Jane Eyre and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

A lot of people could benefit from reading Cusk's account. New mothers will find solace, perhaps, in its pages, validation of their own feelings of isolation and resentment. Working fathers ought to read it, so they can better understand the complaints of their shut-in wives, for whom "work is considered an easy, attractive option." And the childless friends of parents will find the book a highly readable explanation of what is happening in their friends' lives.