The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Cusk, Rachel. A Life’s Work. Picador, 2001.

In her introduction, Cusk explains that her book is an attempt to describe her early experiences with motherhood. She specifies that she sees it as a private experience that does not translate well to a public audience, and remarks that despite her own definitions of woman and mother remaining vague, gender inequality is reinforced by childbirth and childcare.

In “Forty Weeks” (11), Cusk details her pregnancy with her first daughter, focusing on her trepidation about the physical circumstances of childbirth. While she is pregnant, she goes on a trip to the Pyrenees and falls down an icy slope. During this frightening experience, she is shaken by the disconnect between what she feels her physical limitations and abilities are and what they actually are, and suspects that pregnancy contains something of this disconnect, too. She plans to have the baby at home, but this plan is thwarted by medical complications that require her to have a Cesarean section.

In “Lily Bart’s Baby” (45), Cusk remarks that through the character of Lily Bart in the novel The House of Mirth, author Edith Wharton explores the question of what a woman is if not a mother (and a wife and daughter). According to Cusk, when Lily hallucinates the presence of a baby by her side as she dies of a laudanum overdose, the child symbolizes the fulfillment she has been lacking in her relationships with men. Cusk goes on to describe her own awkward beginnings as a mother after her daughter’s birth, during which she is overwhelmed with her new responsibility. By contrast to the question Wharton raises, this experience leaves her with the question of what a woman is if she is a mother, and what a mother is.

In “Colic and Other Stories” (59), Cusk describes her daughter’s crying in the months after her birth and her desperate attempts to stop it. When her daughter finally ceases crying, Cusk has the sense that the child has brought her into being as her mother, and that being a mother means being present and sufficient.

In “Loving, Leaving” (73), Cusk uses examples from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett to explore the sense of moral purity inherent in society’s attitudes towards cleanliness and children. Through further examples from Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, she examines the concept of motherhood as a kind of self-love, as well as the necessary decentering of a mother’s self.

In “Motherbaby” (93), Cusk details her struggles with breastfeeding her daughter, whom she feels is feeding for too long of a period of time without gaining much weight. She explains the conflicted emotions involved in her eventual decision to switch to bottle feeding.

In “Extra Fox” (111), Cusk delves into the world of books on mothering, comparing current literature and philosophies to those of the past. She describes reading children’s books with her daughter and her feeling that she is returning to her own childhood through them.

In “Hell’s Kitchen” (125), Cusk comments on the physical limitations and realities, such as lack of sleep, that come with caring for a child, noting that these limitations apply to all parents but that it is primarily men who express a feeling of outrage about them. She remarks on the incompatibility of parenting with society in general. At the end of the chapter, she reflects on the Coleridge poem “Frost At Midnight” (139), suggesting that the poem depicts a moment of elemental stillness between parent and infant.

In “Help” (143), Cusk recalls attempting to find someone to care for her child. She found herself in the position of not being able to hire the type of experienced nanny she would if she were wealthy. However, uncomfortable inequalities existed between her and the immigrant workers she attempted to employ, and she eventually came to the realization that she was not ready to have someone else care for her daughter.

In “Don’t Forget to Scream” (159), Cusk recounts her family’s temporary move to a university town. While the town was more accommodating to Cusk as a mother, as she was surrounded by other mothers rather than the contrast of childless life in London, it also felt artificial and conservative to her, and they eventually moved away.

In “A Valediction to Sleep” (175), Cusk writes about her sleep loss during the year following her daughter’s birth, and also sympathizes with her daughter’s refusal to sleep and terror of night, exploring the idea that sleep at night is an artificial and arbitrary habit that must be learned. She eventually manages to stop her daughter from crying at night though an approach of limited nighttime visits, but is unsettled when she witnesses the baby playing by herself and laughing instead.

In “Breathe” (194), Cusk introduces a woman named Miranda, a friend who had a child around the same time she did. Miranda monitored her son’s breathing closely at night, terrified that he would stop. She told Cusk that this fear had been sparked by a book she read about a woman whose son died suddenly in his crib. Cusk had the impression that Miranda was a different kind of mother than her, the type who might be perceived as more instinctive or ideal. However, she shows through comparison that the two of them simply have different reactions to their similar anxieties of parenting.

In “Heartburn” (205), Cusk recounts how despite the initial difficulties of mothering, it is also difficult to watch her daughter grow up and away from her. She describes a trip to London, during which she misses her daughter’s presence. While there, she sees a new mother, a woman who is overwhelmed and confused by her crying child. Cusk has an urge to lift the child and comfort it, feeling certain that this would make it stop crying.