After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.
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.
