A Life's Work Audiobook By Rachel Cusk cover art

A Life's Work

On Becoming a Mother

Pre-order: Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

A Life's Work

By: Rachel Cusk
Pre-order: Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $14.99

Pre-order for $14.99

Confirm pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion.

In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk's account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.

©2001 Rachel Cusk (P)2025 Macmillan Audio
Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships Women
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup

Critic reviews

“I love reading it, and found it fascinating, but I also found it dangerous. An incitement to riot...it's an extraordinary piece of work and the writing is utterly beautiful...I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition.” —Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
No reviews yet