I make this explanation with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and even then only mothers who, like me, find the experience so momentous that reading about it has a strangely narcotic effect. Her generation came to experience the brick wall that is one's own (birth) trauma and she is honest enough to accept that we don't know who we are until others make us into something that suddenly fails us anyway.

I have tried to explore some of these issues in this book, with the aim of answering the larger question of what it is to turn from a woman into a mother. There is a ferociously vigilant intelligence at work in every line of this book, which launches it past the tight orbit of self-pity into something that is actually useful – and occasionally grimly funny, like a Helen Simpson story. The memoir proved a breakthrough for Cusk, leading her toward the autobiographical fiction for which she is now best known. 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.This book caused real outrage at its publication, but to my mind it is the most honest and realistic account of new parenthood I've ever read. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself. A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office.

And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. It would have been more pleasant for them inside: the imposition was so direct that I wrote as quickly as I could. This hunger evidently goes unsatisfied, and must content itself with scraps from the table of daily news. I have a bad relationship with my own mother and was pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion. My everlasting thanks to those who wrote in recommending various purveyors of zip-up sleepsuits as a nighttime alternative to fiddly poppers: they have changed my life.

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I wanted to know whether I would go through it, not because this knowledge would have made motherhood imaginable, but because it seemed to me that the issue could not remain shrouded in uncertainty without becoming a distraction.

Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. Alongside her personal narrative, Cusk offers reflections on the experience of motherhood more broadly, drawing on literary depictions of parenthood. Although no one told Cusk that, and so she's gone off and written a book that is funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary -- sort of Apocalypse Baby Now, with descriptions of ''the anarchy of nights, the fog of days . Sooner or later, you end up in family therapy, because it has never occurred to you that it might be an idea to simply bring children up to be happy, or to consider happiness as an option for yourself .

Cusk deserves considerable praise for having the courage to stand up and tell the painful truth, which goes hard against the grain of most literature in this field. I feel sorry for her, especially when she mentions her saddness for the passing of the time when the baby was tiny and dependant, the very moments that caused the author such turmoil. I have little tolerance for whinging and approached it with some trepidation expecting to be irritated.

I had longed to read an "intelligent" perspective on motherhood without the rose-tinted patina that the most popular literature on the subject seemed to be covered with. Living on a borrowed estate, he undertook to clear the property, and his young son bonded with his father as they worked alongside each other in the woods. Just see what happens next, day by day, trusting in the relationship of mother and child above all as the main incoming on a need-to-know basis. Cette frénésie critique, d’après elle, était une réaction à ce qui a été perçu comme la trahison d’un secret bien gardé : les jeunes mères ne sont pas aussi heureuses qu’on voudrait le croire.