A review by jenna_le
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk

5.0

Powerful as a blazing furnace, emotionally, in addition to intelligent, literate, and witty: I devoured all 200+ pages in a single day. Based on all the controversy surrounding this book, all the outraged reviews/hot-takes/thinkpieces, I expected A Life's Work to be unrelentingly serious, but there are many laugh-out-loud hilarious moments, too. I want to hold onto the lesson of the chapter titled "Hell's Kitchen," where the speaker is lifted out of an emotional nadir by reading the Coleridge poem "Frost at Midnight." Times can get hard, brutally so, but maintaining a tether to poetry, to literature, can provide a lifeline. And books, because they may be read aloud (as in the chapter "Extra Fox"), can offer an opportunity for connecting not just with one's past and present selves but with one's child, too.