When the child was born (or perhaps it happened stealthily during the pregnancy, like a brewing storm), life was divided into separate entities that had to fight among themselves for the right to exist. The child, the mother, the partner, the father, the woman, the family, the couple, the individual, the writing, the housekeeping, the work. It was unclear to me what my task was. I was charged with a duty of the utmost importance, but when I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, my hands plunged into an enormous shadow and I could no longer see them. How to live in such a divide? Cut off from oneself and from love. How to connect these murky worlds?
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 and provocative novel and I look forward to reading Ravn again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Date: 2 years and 5 months after the birth
This endless manuscript overwhelms me. It’s bringing me to my knees. I do not want it, this destruction. Take it away from me. I write from a brain-dead place. Without aim. Without connection. Without recognition. There’s madness here, and exposed flesh. This is why no one wants to read the books of mothers. No one wants to know her. To see her become real. But if we don’t look, we live stunted half-lives, each isolated in loneliness, shamefully pushing strollers down the boulevards and suburban streets, between the apartment blocks and through the cemeteries among the dead.
As My Work opens, the narrator (presumably Ravn) suggests that we pretend someone else — someone called “Anna” — wrote what follows in a series of notebooks and then gave them to the narrator to prepare them for publication. And as the notebooks were presented in no particular order, they jump around from her present to Anna’s pregnancy, to when her child is nearly four, and back and forth again. Throughout, Anna struggles with mental illness and seeks help from therapists, and although her partner does seem like an engaged, hands-on dad, his constant misreading of Anna’s needs sees him shooing her out of the house when she would like to be spending time with their son and passing the childcare off to her when she’d rather be writing. Throughout, the father is able to travel around Europe to attend the mounting of his plays, and as the only things that Anna can seem to write about are motherhood and her deteriorating mental state, she is riddled with self-doubt as to whether or not anyone wants to read about these things. The writing is masterful and there are lovely passages on nearly every other page. Here is Anna on attending group therapy:
I don’t know whether I’m lying when I tell them the truth about myself. Each time I tell a secret, it feels as though the secret is retrieved from a bucket inside me that’s filled with fiction. And as soon as the secret is spoken aloud, it hangs above the table between us like a mobile of mirrors and suddenly seems made up. Maybe I believe I can’t live without my secrets. Group therapy is just a theatre in which we play the role of the sick and others play the role of the observers.
And an example of the frequent poetic breaks:
what I hate
about maternity leave is not the child
not the housework not the lack of sleep
but the moment my husband
returns
and filled with
a whole day’s longing I go to him
so he will
take us
into his arms
the moment he sinks into the chair
exhausted
gone again but present
toil surrounds us
onesies
matte plastic bottles greasy pillows
rage destroys me
There are many overt references to women who were able to combine motherhood with a successful writing career throughout the ages — from Saint Birgitta in the 14th Century through Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood — and in the Acknowledgements at the end, Ravn lists all of the women authors whose ideas and phrases were only alluded to in the text. My Work is a highly literary novel that places Ravn comfortably among the authors she evokes; even the formatting here is meant to recall The Golden Notebook by Lessing (and the fact that Lessing left her husband and children in order to concentrate on her writing suggests that giving herself over to childcare isn’t the only path for the narrator.)
Precisely because it’s fiction and not reality, there is no reason to classify the women as ill. All of us can become madwomen creeping along the walls when we read Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and when we read Itō Hiromi, we can all in our imaginations kill our infants together.
I loved everything about My Work — it is serious and compelling, totally relatable — just don’t come expecting the “funny”.
