My Work

By: Olga Ravn

Narrated by: Laura Jennings

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.

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.

©2023 Olga Ravn & Gyldendal, Copenhagen; Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp.

Critic reviews

“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down.”—Politiken