Olga Ravn’s 'My Work'

Throughout Olga Ravn’s latest novel, My Work, protagonist and new mother Anna repeatedly says she wants to write a “normal book.” It’s a brilliant refrain, because of course Ravn’s book is anything but normal, though it is an ambitious one. In some ways, it is less an attempt to write a novel and more an attempt to create a body of work around a central question: who is a writer when she is also a mother? Or as Ravn asks, “must she kill the writer inside to become a good mother?”