My work

Ravn (The Employees) combines autofiction, criticism, and poetry for a remarkable experimental narrative that probes the dark side of pregnancy, childhood, and new motherhood. In vignettes that serve as a framing device, a fictional Ravn recounts finding a pregnancy journal four years after her first child was born, along with other pages written postpartum that she doesn't remember having produced ("If it weren't for my handwriting, I might have assumed it was all written by a stranger"). Credit for these writings is assigned to Anna, an authorial double named after the protagonist of Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook." Anna devotes many passages to her anxiety, and she copes by reminding herself she has a way out with suicide. A new riff emerges on the classic doppelgänger trope of doubles in mortal combat, as Ravn imagines Anna stabbing her to death. It's an unsettling and visionary fictional enactment of Ravn's thinking, which is on glimmering display in chapters devoted to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where Ravn considers how a woman writer's creative output can be both dangerous and essential to her survival. This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the inspiration for the character Anna's name.

An intimate exploration of the brutal wonders of motherhood. Anna, a Danish author, and Aksel, a Swedish playwright, have just had their first baby. Or they are pregnant with their first baby. Or their eldest child is turning 4 and Anna is pregnant with their second. All these time frames are alternatingly true in this heady, iconoclastic examination of Anna's journey through pregnancy and into motherhood. In the decentralized space of the novel, Anna's diaries and journal notes have been compiled in a chronology that appears random, but would be better described as intuitive, by an unnamed curatorial presence to whom Anna has entrusted "the pages [that] lay haphazardly in a large pile." This curatorial presence ascribes a pattern to Anna's thoughts, which veer steeply into a dark psychology of anxiety, isolation, and fear as the pregnancy progresses, a condition that worsens in the early years of the child's infancy. Anna describes the book she herself is writing in these pages as a "dirty book, a misshapen book, a book cut wrong….A book written in the child's time. A chopped-up, stuttering book. A book with bottomless holes to fall into, like never-ending breastfeedings…a book that creates space for pain and from this space engenders a possible future happiness," upon which the curatorial presence seeks to impose some kind of transliterated order. The fact that the curatorial presence is likely also the author, that Anna herself is an invention created to preserve a necessary distance between the experience of pain and the arrangement of pain into art, does nothing to lessen the intensity of the intimacy created between the reader and Anna. As page after page unfolds--sometimes in diary entries, sometimes in verse, sometimes in recorded scraps of pregnancy advice or ad copy--what is created is an unflinchingly honest reflection of a woman's experience of her own body as it becomes a body that belongs also to the child. This experience includes beauty and pain, rage and tenderness, fear, suspicion, doubt, and the imperative Anna feels to do her work: the work of writing, of mothering, but above all, as Anna says, "These parts of me, separate yet linked, to connect them, to gather them in one place; that is my work." A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.