Description
When first published in 2001, it divided female critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them. Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself and the book as protests grew over its honest, gritty account of the misery of those early months. It is a seminal, standout book on the complications of being an ambivalent mum in an age of whitewashed, Annabel Karmel–style new families.