Olga Ravn; translated from the Danish by Sophi Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
My Work by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Sophi Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, moves haphazardly between prose, poetry, diary entries, letters, information pamphlets, short biographies of mothers who were authors, and literary references, all of which express the complexities of motherhood.
The novel rotates between two protagonists who are aspects of the same individual: Anna, the ostensible author of the journals of her pregnancy, birth, and her son’s toddler years; and the unnamed narrator who combs through these journals and tries to organize and make sense of them. Both narrators are writers. The scattered, hodge-podge, and fragmentary nature of the narrative is accentuated by the non-linear timeline which includes different beginnings and endings. The novel moves back and forth between the two narrators as they converse and question one another. Their relationship is fraught with tension. At one point, Anna gets so frustrated, she stabs the narrator to death, waits for her to revive, and stabs her, again.
Anna describes her anxiety and depression after becoming a mother. She is haunted by feelings of inadequacy for the task of parenting. Plagued with suicidal thoughts, she undergoes therapy, which helps to stabilize her. She feels alienated from her own body during pregnancy and experiences ambivalence toward the infant for erasing her identity. She charts how the pregnancy and birth have transformed her relationship with her husband.
The strength of the novel lies in its unflinching interrogation of the drudgery, tedium, exhaustion, and isolation many women experience upon becoming mothers. The daily and seemingly endless grind of feedings, diaper changes, sleepless nights, and screaming babies is described in graphic detail as a mother’s work with the home as her work place. Anna experiences contradictory impulses of wanting to abandon the baby and never wanting to put him down. Since motherhood is a job that intrudes on women’s lives, their bodies, their creativity, and their very sense of self, Anna wonders why we bother to have children, at all. She questions the value and purpose of motherhood. She claims that because women are socialized to believe the experience of pregnancy, birthing, and child-rearing are painless and rewarding, they are ashamed to admit feeling otherwise.
In this stylistically unique novel, Olga Ravn powerfully evokes the disorientation, conflicting impulses, isolation, and loss of selfhood that women may experience in early motherhood. Her experimental narrative dares to voice what some women feel as they struggle to soothe a screaming baby during the long hours of yet another sleepless night.