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Book Summary and Reviews of My Work by Olga Ravn

My Work by Olga Ravn

My Work

by Olga Ravn

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  • Oct 2023, 416 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An unflinchingly honest reflection of a woman's experience of her own body as it becomes a body that belongs also to the child. This experience includes beauty and pain, rage and tenderness, fear, suspicion, doubt…A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Explores childbirth and motherhood by mixing different literary forms―fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, letters―with [Ravn's] signature experimental flair." ―The Millions

"This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space." ―The Guardian

"Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn's book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that's hard to put down." ―Politiken (Denmark)

This information about My Work was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Gloria M

Give it a chance!
This could be a slightly complicated read. On one hand it definitely cracks open the myth that pregnancy is all glowing and magical and that mothers instantly bond with their offspring, but the protagonist harbors some dark feelings towards her child and this will likely make most readers squirm uncomfortably-which may very well be the intention of the author, Olga Ravn. It shares the idea that bearing and raising a child is work and also details the protagonist turning to writing as work to retain her sense of self.

The back cover says it is "....radical, funny and mercilessly honest". The reader might not agree with the funny claim; the only humor seems to be in the unusual shopping sprees and some of the diary entries, " My doctor repeats that thinking you're going insane is a very common symptom of anxiety, but that the nausea is concerning".

Anna clearly has some issues with her current state of mind, "Let's agree right now that someone else has written it. Another woman, entirely unlike me. Let's call her Anna......I don't want anyone but me to know her".

The narrative jumps back and forth through time, and employs normal chapters, medical chart entries, poetry, diary entries and letters to tell the story of a woman who experiences many physical discomforts during her pregnancy. Anna also suffers from anxiety and depression both during and after this period. Her writing seems to be both therapy and release (though she actually does go to therapy-both individual and group).

Even if you are a mother, the parts where Anna feels she wants to kill her child, or imagines the death of the child are difficult to read. They are so fraught with negativity, even Anna does not want to re-read them. Still, Ravn has created a compelling woman and an important work of fiction. It definitely gives insights into motherhood that are not prevalent in the world today, give it a chance!

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Author Information

Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with the Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's writings that relaunched Ditlevsen readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell are translators living in Copenhagen. Together, they have translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.

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