A Life's Work

When first published in 2001, it divided female critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children were taken into care, that was she was unfit to look after them. Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself and the book as protests grew about the its honest, gritty account of the misery of those early months.

It is a seminal, stand-out book on the complications of being an ambivalent mum in an age of white-washed, Annabel Karmel'd new families.

©2020 Rachel Cusk (P)2020 Faber & Faber

Holding up a mirror

I absolutely loved Rachel Cusk’s controversial memoir about her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. She masterfully and evocatively put into words things I would never have found a way to explain, and reflected on the sociocultural context of motherhood in an insightful and provocative but never preachy way. Can’t wait to read/hear her other work.