Stack writes, unflinchingly, about what it was like for her world to shrink and her life to entwine with the lives of her hired help—who left their own kids behind in order to work in her home. The result is messy, self-critical, probing and fascinating ... She also works to turn her own daily 'postmodern feminist breakdown' into an exploration of the ways that domestic work has and continues to shape women’s realities ... Stack’s writing is sharp and lovely, especially in the first section of the book as she deftly describes her plunge into new motherhood and yearlong journey to find herself again ... the one way the book didn’t fully succeed was in sharing these women’s full perspectives ... In this book, the tough questions Stack asks are of herself.

Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but Women’s Work dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible ... Stack writes sharp, pointed sentences that flash with dark insight ... Women’s Work is so full of keen insights and shrewd observations that by the time Stack arrived at her What Needs to Be Done moment, a mere six pages from the end, she had already won me over so fully that I was only mildly exasperated when she landed on this: 'The answer is the men' ... [Stack's] wan conclusion to an otherwise fearless book feels like a bit of a put-on and a bit of a cop-out.

...an uneasy combination. The first quarter or so of Women’s Work is largely a memoir of early motherhood, with all its pain and anxiety, in the tell-it-like-it-is tradition of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. The final quarter finds Stack in journalist mode, bringing her professional skills to bear on her own story ... Stack does not discuss or acknowledge this history, and the omission manages to work both for and against her. This is not breaking news, you want to tell her. Do the homework. But, at the same time, Stack’s sense of discovery is fresh, her anger is still hot, and these qualities give her story its force ... This makes it hard to look away but also hard not to feel claustrophobic ... You get the sense that these were meaningful encounters for Stack, but as journalism they fall a bit flat ... However formidable Stack’s professional skill, reporting introduces a new power imbalance: She controls the conversation; she controls the story that emerges. And the employer/employee relationship is not so easily set aside ... Stack lets nothing slide when it comes to herself, though; she’s unsparing, even brutal ... There’s bravery in a writer’s willingness to look bad. A genuine reckoning demands it.

Stack, who had stints in Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow and Beijing for the Los Angeles Times, is a natural storyteller with an eye for detail ... This is a painfully honest investigation of what kind of compromises women make by hiring other women to do the grunt work ... Stack confronts a reality that many try not to think about: Who are the women who care for my children and clean my house? ... a double-edged indictment: of those, including Stack, who exploit domestic helpers in their desire to remain relevant in work but also of the men who abdicate responsibility ... In an unflinching way, Stack pulls the curtain back on the truths of women’s lives, especially the domestic part: how women make it work.

Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection ... Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.

The experience of hiring domestic workers for the first time while living abroad radicalizes [Stack], although she stops short of quite connecting all the dots ... Right up to the last page, Stack keeps doing this: almost landing on the Marxist polemic she swears she’s not writing. She never gets there because her book never mentions—or, you could say, it erases—decades of socialist feminist thought that preceded it. For such a worldly woman, and a journalist, it’s almost unbelievable that she never discovered this rich history. Or maybe she left it out on purpose, to lure in other comfortable white women who can’t quite put their finger on why they feel so bad about having a nanny but might balk at a socialist framing.

Stack is unflinching in her account ... her prose is beautiful ... At its best moments, Stack’s book is a sharply observed, evocative reckoning with the ways her struggles intersect and diverge with those of the women she employs. As it progresses, however, her own narrative overshadows those of the women she wishes to reveal. She shows us how we have ignored these women and exploited them. She names the difference, but as readers we do not get to travel across it.

A self-critical and heartfelt narrative ... eye-opening ... These chapters are beautifully written, informative, and sometimes harrowing as she recounts the joy, fear, and exhaustion of becoming a mother. Her chronicle of how she found her way out of depression offers wisdom that new mothers will find supportive and enlightening ... Stack writes compassionately about her encounters with her nannies ... What women—and men—can learn from Stack’s story is that 'women’s work,' in all of its complexity and construction, should not be only for women.