My Work
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.
My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down.”—Politiken
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ravn (The Employees) combines autofiction, criticism, and poetry for a remarkable experimental narrative that probes the dark side of pregnancy, childhood, and new motherhood. In vignettes that serve as a framing device, a fictional Ravn recounts finding a pregnancy journal four years after her first child was born, along with other pages written postpartum that she doesn't remember having produced ("If it weren't for my handwriting, I might have assumed it was all written by a stranger"). Credit for these writings is assigned to Anna, an authorial double named after the protagonist of Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook." Anna devotes many passages to her anxiety, and she copes by reminding herself she has a way out with suicide. A new riff emerges on the classic doppelgänger trope of doubles in mortal combat, as Ravn imagines Anna stabbing her to death. It's an unsettling and visionary fictional enactment of Ravn's thinking, which is on glimmering display in chapters devoted to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where Ravn considers how a woman writer's creative output can be both dangerous and essential to her survival. This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic. Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the inspiration for the character Anna's name.
