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.
In My Work, a young writer, Anna, has a mental health crisis after becoming a mother. She is debilitated by anxiety and depression. “Why do I want to die, she thinks.” Slowly, with treatment, she begins to stabilise. She forces space for writing a kind of diary. This, we are told, falls into the hands of Ravn, who, “after typing it all up, and seeing the staggering total number of pages, was filled with a feeling I can only call horror”. If The Employees asks what truly separates different classes of labouring life forms, My Work opens up a chasm between one woman and herself, who after giving birth “became less human”.
Ravn and her translators, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, move effortlessly between prose, poetry, diary, script, information leaflet, letter and literary criticism, but the book purposefully asks its reader to accommodate wild jumps in tone. In the opening prose narrative, there is a volley of easy pot-shots: at the “bitch” midwife who leads the childbirth class, at couples who buy organic cloth nappies, at an expensive acupuncturist who keeps the door locked because it’s Friday the 13th. The birth is presented as a timeline of medical notes, clinical and impersonal, surprisingly affecting in their attention to detail. This report gives way to a passage of startling verse: “in the washing machine’s drawer / not separate compartments for detergent / but two swollen labia / grey and covered in / meat juice”. The image seems to belong in an entirely different book. Mothers, Ravn knows, are not supposed to think such thoughts.
At Anna’s first medical checkup during her second pregnancy, the midwife can’t find the notes from the five days when Anna was hospitalised after her first birth. Here Ravn tells us she senses an opportunity to “fill them with lies, make up anything at all, magnify the madness, turn the pain into a story”. This casts doubt on the representation of Anna’s experience, but also sets her reality against society’s story of the happy mother, challenging it to “admit that it’s a lie”. My Work turns Anna’s “deep uncertainty as to whether she was doing the right thing” into an aesthetic of contrast and contradiction. Here, on the one hand, is a slice of literary realism, in which a comfortable, successful young couple navigate their child’s first Christmas, in which Anna “goes to work. She goes grocery shopping. She picks up clothes off the floor.” Here, on the other hand, is a script in which Anna stabs the author to death in the supermarket. “‘Hello, everyone!’ shouts Anna. ‘My name is Anna and I am a knife!’”
• My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, is published by Lolli (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
