To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up.

I say ‘other mothers’ and ‘only mothers’ as if in apology: the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. A Life’s Work is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. My definitions, of woman and of mother, remain vague, but the process continues to exert on me a real fascination. Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself and the book as protests grew about the its honest, gritty account of the misery of those early months.Cusk’s baby cries all the time, and she is upfront about how challenging this is and the loss of identity that motherhood entails. If I were still in the midst of it I expect I would seize on the book in the same frame of mind as Noah did his ark. Both parents can work and employ a nanny or childminder, or sometimes each can work a shorter week and spend some days at home and some at work. However, if you want a brutally honest and often times humorous look at the trials and tribulations of new motherhood, pick it up and give it a try.

But nevertheless, I persisted, convinced that the fields Cusk embarked on were by this stage well ploughed. However, Cusk does find literary parents, in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Frost At Midnight. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. J’ai juste voulu être honnête’ a-t-elle répondu dans un article pour le Guardian dans lequel elle a tenté de comprendre pourquoi son livre avait attiré autant de critiques hostiles à sa sortie.

Yet I had experienced it, in a way: it was part of what I had found intolerable in the public culture of motherhood, the childcare manuals and the toddler groups, the discourse of domestic life, even the politics of birth itself.There is also some evidence that if the mother sleeps with the baby in bed (and nobody else eg like a partner), there's a decrease in cot death and the mother definitely gets more sleep. We should reserve the right to spend our pre-motherhood days thinking of it scarcely at all, a freedom the women of the past were never granted. Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life.