Rachel seemed content to own her own experience without any noticeable intention of trying to give or receive anything. The loss of identity, of place in the world, the isolation, the agony of sleep deprivation, of anxiety. It is my belief that in this enterprise generosity is more important even than equality, if only because the demonology of parenthood is so catholic, drawing to itself epithets of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that are largely absent from our experience of ordinary life.

When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women. Nor should we feel the need to constantly bow and scrape to those who have been there before: even discounting Covid, having a baby in 2022 is necessarily different to doing so in 2002, or 1992. My definitions, of woman and of mother, remain vague, but the process continues to exert on me a real fascination. Claire Messud, Guardian Books of the Year 'Cusk is not afraid to address frankly the grief for freedom lost, the despair, pain, boredom and guilt - all in the context of the mother's unspeakable love for the baby .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. In the best passage in A Life’s Work, Cusk describes the experience of reading books that she has loved again since becoming a mother, and finding them changed. I would recommend against reading this if you are unwell or going through events that provoke any of the feelings described above.

Even though right at this moment her own style hits me as self-conscious and pretentious, I liked the literature she quoted and what she obviously got out of this herself, and something tells me this is a book it may be rewarding to revisit in times of need. 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.Full-time paid childcare was what I, with the blithe unsentimentality of the childless, once believed to be the solution to the conundrum of work and motherhood. I could not have been more wrong, and although my children are wonderful I often found that in caring for them, I was losing myself. She just wrote like she was telling her story to someone that wouldn't be offended and once I caught on, I really enjoyed it. How does the baby survive while the parent learns to understand and respond to the child's communications?