Cusk on Modern Motherhood

On Mother's Day, Rachel Cusk writes – to serve up a hackney on rye, cliché on the side – this thought-provoking review of Rebecca Asher's Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality. It also serves as a useful reminder of Cusk's brutal and beautiful memoir of maternity, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother – one of the most honest accounts of this strange and ambivalent business of mothering I have ever read. It was a useful book for me, as I pored over its pages in between feeds in the first months (yes, months) of my daughter's life. When I wasn't throwing it across the room, I was sighing That's exactly how it is. If you're on the hunt for a last-minute Mother's Day gift, you could do worse.