A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: TIME, LIT HUB, THE MILLIONS
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna 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.
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
This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?
— Kate Zambreno
My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive.
— Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
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
On the surface, My Work seems quite different in scope [from The Employees]...but something tells me that interacting with humanoids and sentient space objects have more in common with the first stages of motherhood than one might think.
— Eliza Smith, Lit Hub
Funny and ruthless.
— Shannon Carlin, Time
Ravn has created a truly unique project which is not so much a story as it is an accumulation. It is all the selves, shed and grown, that mothers and birthing people encounter in the slippery aftermath of childbirth; it is the documentation of the mother/art monster problem, a problem that in Ravn’s telling, is as much about addition as it is subtraction.
— Amber Sparks, The Brooklyn Rail
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.
— Caleb Klaces, The Guardian
My Work explores childbirth and motherhood by mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, letters—with [Ravn’s] signature experimental flair.
— Sophia Stewart, The Millions
My Work is a marvel, and it puts Ravn in rare company amongst contemporary authors. It’s not often that architects of such finely engineered structures point them toward our collective humanity instead of their own mechanics.
