Still, I’m glad I listened, the narrator is very good, the book is quite short and it’s nice to have my own opinion about these somewhat controversial/marmite books. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all. That is an issue of sexual politics; but even in the most generous household, which I acknowledge my own to be, the gulf between childcarer and worker is profound. A lover of literature, she wants to turn to the classics for guidance, but she realizes that she has never paid much attention to literary descriptions of parenthood, instead skimming them, feeling that they were not relevant to her. Cusk does, at some stage, find herself indivisible from her daughter on every level; she recognises herself as a baby-mother unit and it is maybe a bit frustrating that she doesn't come to the conclusion (sooner) that babies are highly sensitive to super-sensible connections that run far deeper than biology can explain.

She describes in stark vividness her treatment by midwives, health visitors, doctors, her friends, her partner. I had written other parts of the book in some uncomfortable places: the cold cobwebbed vestry of my parents'-in-law's local church, to which my mother-in-law had the key; the attic of another, earlier house whose stairs were so narrow for my increasingly pregnant body that it seemed possible I might one day get permanently stuck up there. But women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. The public reaction to this brilliant account of early motherhood was at the time swift and brutal – and the judgment it received came mostly from other women, writing in newspapers. Some alchemy of her prose renders this most fascinating and boring of all subjects graceful, eloquent, modest and true.Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of six novels: Saving Agnes , which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary ; The Country Life , which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones , which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award; In the Fold , and Arlington Park , which was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Nevertheless, I remain uneasy in the public places of motherhood - the school gate, the coffee circuit - where the skies can unexpectedly open and judgment rain down on one's head.

At other times, finding she misses her daughter while she is sleeping, she lies down beside her cradle. Sa mère se retrouve ainsi emprisonnée dans un ‘bunker coupé du reste du monde’, dont les geôliers sont les autres mères, les sages-femmes, les méde-cins et autres assistantes sociales, dans un monde totalitaire régi par l’idéologie des ouvrages sur l’éducation

An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure. La société et les médias voudraient nous persuader que la naissance et les premiers mois d’un enfant sont les plus beaux moments de la vie d’une femme.

I say ‘other mothers’ and ‘only mothers’ as if in apology: the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. I continue to marvel at the fact that every single member of our species has been born and brought to independence by so arduous a route. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children were taken into care, that was she was unfit to look after them.Cusk anatomises motherhood as Montaigne anatomised friendship or Robert Burton anatomised melancholy . It was this distraction, as much as the fact of motherhood itself, that I wanted to have within my control. My everlasting thanks to those who wrote in recommending various purveyors of zip-up sleepsuits as a nighttime alternative to fiddly poppers: they have changed my life. But the impact of these and many other realisations is far more violent and dramatic for the author than it was for me. Its time scheme is wild - vertiginously unchronological, as if to convey the disorientation of fatigue: babies destroy all sense of conventional time .

A Life's Work] is as compulsive as a thriller although its plot (pregnancy, birth, colic, sleepless nights) is - naturally - a shambles and its cast tiny and undistinguished (mother, father, baby, doctor, health visitor, a few friends). I read this sitting in the foot-high summer grass that grew through the terrace, above a wild sea of rhododendron bushes. Given this is one of the most universally shared experiences it's odd there aren't a plethora of books in this vein, but the author reveals why.Cusk feels alienated by the advice of healthcare professionals, the official literature on childcare, and the perspectives of her peers at mother-and-baby groups. How does the baby survive while the parent learns to understand and respond to the child's communications? It was my sincere belief that nobody would read it or care about it, and in all honesty I didn't blame them. It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again. There is some evidence now that colic is caused by an immature autonomic nervous system, which is why it often disappears after 3 months.