“Who wrote this book?
I did, of course.
Although I’d like to convince you otherwise.”
My Work begins by drawing attention to itself and cajoling the reader, as one would with a child. Humor me, the opening requests, let the author be Anna, let her be named after Anna Wulf’s fragmentary records in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Anna is the character who experiences childbirth, makes hospital visits, has medical records, even a journal of pregnancy — in all, there is to be no doubt that the self-fashioning of autofiction is the self-fashioning into motherhood, a social position experienced as immersion into an isolating intimate bond. Who better, then, to write about a tumultuous, dense, contradictory inner life than a character who is already a mother?
But who decides who is a mother — and what is a mother anyway? Much of this fugue-like narrative is devoted to pinning down the concept of motherhood and beating the ideology out of it. Out with the state laying claim to the woman’s body. Out with the pathologization of flesh. Out with self-annihilation to serve the needs of the child. Out with the loving complicity in that annihilation. In one poem fragment, Ravn writes: “No biography / just a child.” In another, about 100 pages later: “I am the only one who has made good use of myself.”
In non-linear entries, the narrative dramatizes the mediation between labor and the other, between the woman at work (bearing and then extricating herself from a newborn) and the child (a self in the making). Between the mothering woman (Anna) and the writing self (‘I’) persists what Simone de Beauvoir calls motherhood’s impossible syllogism (“It happens, but I’m not there,” Beauvoir cites as an example). My Work is also about writing motherhood into existence, which occurs in stops and starts, with 13 beginnings, 28 continuations and nine ends.
There is a cast of characters amid hospital notes, letters to Anna from the narrator, plays set in shopping marts, notes from a residency, and other formal devices:
“At the moment of childbirth (or perhaps it brewed stealthily like a storm during the pregnancy), life was divided into separate entities that now must fight for the right to exist. The child, the mother, the partner, the father, the woman, the family, the couple, the individual, the writing, the housekeeping, the work.”
The cast includes Anna, the unreliable first-person narrator, the child (in the womb, being birthed, and growing), the husband Askel, and healthcare personnel including doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, and others. The book shuttles between Anna and narrator as well as the patient (designated as “Pt”), and also between the character rendered as a pathologized body through medical reports, as a woman (a “hysterical she”) through confessional entries, or as one trying on a new voice through citation, record or the imitation of other poets. There are play-like sections, which beget the question: is the narrator also borrowing her husband’s playwriting voice alongside the form? There are sections where an external character’s voice bleeds into the narrator’s musing and unstable speaking of a self at work.
Labor — which Ravn calls “women’s wageless work” — is the motivating concern here. Part of that work is gathering all the selves and placing them together, as the narrator says. Birth and early motherhood become discoveries bequeathed by Anna in the form of loose-leaf papers to the unnamed narrator for her to put together as a book. Motherhood is literalized as gift, perhaps even a pragmatic gift, which the narrator then claims to sell for an advance to pay the bills. Insofar as this is a gimmick, it is Ravn’s best laid one, where the gift of Anna’s authorial and maternal voice crafts a second (often competing, often polyphonous) second authorial voice of a writing subject.
Sianne Ngai, writing about the gimmick, calls it a labor-saving device, drawing its history back to feminist technoscientific devices like washing machines. The narrator, anxious and uncertain about her writing, wonders whether she is simply tracing, writing “on top of another book” on “borrowed time” (the narrator also compares writing to the immersion of a task as regular as doing laundry). Theft and property, cradle-snatchers and homewreckers, make appearances in the narratives — and there is Anna as well, stealing love, a child, and a profession from the speaker. Motherhood becomes a spectator sport. Ngai’s formulation of the gimmick invests its audience with judgements about overperformance and underperformance; both of the women, these authorial maternal voices and spectators, worry about their own performances of motherhood. Failure looms over them, skewering them in a sociable circle.
Anxiety becomes the representative feminine disorder (as Freud claimed it was) of motherhood — but one akin to a job. Ravn writes, “everything around us installs women in worry machines, and … this worry is also a job, a duty. But how to phrase that?” Such rhetorical impasses nevertheless yield much insight within My Work. Ravn makes such compulsive and unbearable admissions into something of an asset. Modesty makes her call it a “confessional” (as if admitting to the pain and terror of motherhood is merely the female complaint rendered to its biological parts), but the narrative actually works at interrogating an arrested subjective position, cutting barnacles from the apparently naturalized formation and position of motherhood. It is leavened and hard-earned.
But there are other labors, too, ubiquitous like housekeeping and breastfeeding, and taking oneself to the clinic. Motherhood, for Ravn, exists inside an economy of care (spread plastic thin between subject formation and suicidal ideation, one that involves maintaining the heterosexual nuclear family unit and managing competing natal and national culture) produced around caring for a fetus or a child as the primary occupation. Ravn dwells on breastfeeding, a task that has gathered a discursive field as a maternal occupation for the child’s well-being. For Askel, breastfeeding is the mother laying proprietary claim to the child; for the mother, it is an act that suspends herself and child in vitro, where she is returned to a familiar pain, as well as where she finds vindication of herself as a practicing mother. The mother experiences it as both biological need and demand, the price of which, however painful, restores her to the symbolic existence of being a living body. But while the painful latching of a child’s mouth naturalizes her motherhood, it denaturalizes the prior intimacy with her lover: “To become a mother is to lose the dream of a husband.” The narrator experiences motherhood precisely as the valorization of her reproductive power, her childbearing and childrearing, which also simultaneously severs her from experiencing love:
“… when I did this work — making a child — about which he was clueless, a work no one saw; when I had to lie to him about how his minimal efforts were equal to mine while I bled from wounds in inner organs he did not have, had to show him gratitude to make him stay, soothe his nerves, I understood there was no one with whom to share my innermost feelings. Our paths diverged. And after motherhood, the dream of an absolute romantic love was lost.”
Motherhood’s labor is not only productive, unpaid, and naturalized, but is also alienating. My Work invites comparisons with Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, narratives that treat the singular experience of motherhood as a crisis of the self, chaff for high art. While My Work decidedly claims that motherhood actively dictates writing in the manner of a ghostly authoring, each of these texts implicate work (in these cases, writing) primarily to determine how motherhood alienates labor, and so also alienates an otherwise public figure of letters from the domain of a public life. To write as a mother is to write from a merely natural and representative center stage; these writers attempt to speak about their excision from symbolic utterances once they have been overdetermined as maternal. They say mothers speak only of their children, carry pictures in their pockets — is she allowed to speak otherwise?
She writes, “We demand of a mother that she does not write that way about her children, about her motherhood. For a mother, everything cannot be fiction. One could say: A mother has no right to fiction. Or: To be a mother is to lose the right to fiction.”
In this novel, the narrator returns to the store, becomes one consumer among many, becomes the ideal consumer: a woman at work. “In an attempt to feel at one with the world, she went shopping. That was the closest she could come to joining a global circuit.”
My Work is a gradual arithmetic of subtraction of the self from the other, the writer removed from the woman, the anxiety reduced to the pathologized body. Ravn’s latest is a triumph that teaches us to see mothers — bodies, viserca, child, lover, work and all. The novel places the overdetermined, overperformed self and holds it in place for us to watch the woman contingently lay claim to herself again.
And then, we watch her reproduce again, becoming part of the global circuitry, revived as a consummated text.
[Published by New Directions on October 10, 2023, 390 pages, $18.95 US paperback]