Time is nonlinear. The novel is fragmentary ... This collage could be frustrating — a stylish evasion of plot or character. Instead, it is exactly right, capturing the overwhelming disorientation of early motherhood ... There are moments when My Work is long-winded and needlessly repetitive. But these are forgivable flaws, given the rare skill with which Ravn dramatizes the psychic commotion of motherhood.
Of course Ravn’s book is anything but normal, though it is an ambitious one ... Displays...power ... Ravn has created a truly unique project which is not so much a story as it is an accumulation.
Ravn’s self-reflexive game grows muddled ... Sometimes the voice is impersonal ... We may even salute this variant experiment in form. But this novel is laborious: less Olga Ravn’s work than our own.
Not unusual in folding a knowledgable, articulate discussion of this work into a real-time analysis of its own intimate story. But that story, told across a range of forms, is at once irrepressibly lively and painfully elusive. The strength of this book is the way that it dramatises a gap between explanation and lived experience ... Ravn and her translators, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, move effortlessly between prose, poetry, diary, script, information leaflet, letter and literary criticism.
A remarkable experimental narrative that probes the dark side of pregnancy, childhood, and new motherhood ... This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic.
