My Work by Olga Ravn

Anna is a writer and new mother, renegotiating her sense of self as a woman and artist after the birth of her son. Newly relocated from Copenhagen to Stockholm, nothing is familiar and her relationship with her partner Aksel is strained. She sees Aksel as competition for the baby’s attention, afraid of becoming superfluous in her son’s life, while simultaneously struggling with the sense of being subsumed by motherhood. Aksel is back to work quickly, while Anna faces logistical and creative challenges returning to her writing practice. Her pregnancy brought anxiety and compulsive thought patterns that continue into postpartum life as she struggles to connect to her son. Feeling isolated, unsupported, and anxious, Anna becomes addicted to reading the news, buying clothes she doesn’t need, and wondering if she is fit to be a mother. Told through poetry, prose, conversations, and medical reports, this novel is an achronological assemblage, its structural innovation suggesting the messiness of pregnancy and early motherhood, the struggle to make sense of it as it happens.

Olga Ravn was inspired by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist, recording her life in four different notebooks, attempts to integrate them into one cohesive narrative. Anna is similarly preoccupied with integration: integration of her new responsibilities as a mother into the life she is used to; integration of her disparate identities — writer, mother, feminist; her futile and misguided attempts to integrate her mental illness into her sense of self. Work is, of course, a potent theme throughout the text, as well. Of course, Anna thinks about her work as a writer and the often unsung work of mothering — and how these two roles compete and complement one another. She integrates these ideas by reading and writing about motherhood, by turning the work of mothering into the work of writing. She says, “These parts of me, separate yet linked, to connect them, to gather them in one place – that’s my work.” Like Lessing’s protagonist, Anna seeks to make the fragments of herself into a discrete whole. Labour, a synonym for work, makes the resonances between these roles clearer: Anna’s work started as she laboured to deliver her son.

Throughout the novel, we are reminded that “Anna” is a creation by the author, a character used to make sense of an experience that is too visceral to be examined directly. “Anna”, then, represents the creation of something adjacent to a human life, distinct from but related to a human baby, an assemblage that made me think not only of Doris Lessing’s protagonist but of Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, the novel is saturated with intertextuality and connections to other ideas. Anna makes sense of herself through reading about motherhood; Anna is, herself, a device used to make sense of the world. In My Work, writing, raising a child, and theorizing motherhood are all things that cannot be done alone. They are collective forms of labour, and, as Anna begins to place herself among the world of ideas, she becomes less alone, more connected to humanity and the lineage of mothers she has joined.

Ravn is an audacious writer, as evidenced in her English debut The Employees (2020). Where that novel was set on a spaceship in the twenty-second century, My Work is an intimate and sometimes painfully realistic novel that lingers in the quotidian. Both, of course, deal with work in different ways: The Employees, though a speculative novel, takes up exploitation, productivity culture, and dehumanization within the workplace, while My Work explores gendered domesticity, the work of raising a child, and creative work as a calling. Ravn has taken a risk in her choice to tackle taboo topics — Anna’s maternal ambivalence, most obviously — and to experiment with the form of the novel. The risk pays off; it’s a dazzling achievement, an exploration of mythologies of motherhood that feels necessary and urgent. The novel asks, “If Anna’s job is to bring children into the world, to keep the house clean, the food healthy and the heart warm, to care for and strengthen her body so that it is at the disposal of future foetuses, of children who want to be carried, babies who want to be breastfed and men who want to be loved — if this is Anna’s work — is her writing about her body and home not precisely workplace literature?” Ravn makes a provocative and compelling intervention into writing on motherhood by challenging the banishment of motherhood and domestic labour from discussions of work. It is an ambitious and accomplished novel that acts simultaneously as a work of theory; it is bold, original, and brilliant.

Ravn makes a provocative and compelling intervention into writing on motherhood by challenging the banishment of motherhood and domestic labour from discussions of work … It is an ambitious and accomplished novel that acts simultaneously as a work of theory; it is bold, original, and brilliant.

Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Time Magazine named The Employees one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. My Work, originally published in Danish as Mit arbejde, won the Politiken Literature Prize in 2020. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal, she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. She has also worked as a critic, teacher, and translator. Ravn lives in Copenhagen.

Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith are translators living in Copenhagen. They received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for their co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s All the Birds in the Sky in 2020. Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Asymptote, EuropeNow, Poetry International, and on stage.

Publisher: Book*hug Press (September 5, 2023)
Paperback 5.25″ x 8″ | 390 pages
ISBN: 9781771668644

Clementine Oberst

Clementine Oberst is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in television studies. Born and raised in Toronto, she has lived in Montreal and Glasgow and now calls Hamilton home. When she isn't writing her dissertation, Clementine can be found knitting, trying to cultivate a green thumb, and playing with her cats. She loves nothing more than losing herself in a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @clementinereads.