The Danish author Olga Ravn would have been a teenager when Rachel Cusk’s 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, was first published. Cusk’s intense, elegant description of one woman’s experience marked the beginning of a wave of important writing on the subjective, often ambivalent interior world of early motherhood. Ravn’s rangy, unsettled new autofiction, My Work, is not unusual in folding a knowledgable, articulate discussion of this work into a real-time analysis of its own intimate story. But that story, told across a range of forms, is at once irrepressibly lively and painfully elusive. The strength of this book is the way that it dramatises a gap between explanation and lived experience. Our culture, Jacqueline Rose has written, “tears mothers to pieces”. In response, My Work deliberately tears the novel to pieces.
Ravn’s previous novel, The Employees, is a series of interview statements from workers on a doomed spaceship. Some voices belong to humans and some to humanoids, but it’s difficult to tell which is which. “When I began to cry,” someone recalls, “you said, ‘You can’t cry, you’re not programmed to cry.’” Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker prize, it’s a cool, impish book, distilling a sense of uncanny alienation.
