The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion. In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk's account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.

蕾切爾·卡斯剋（Rachel Cusk, 1967.2.8— ），英國作傢，畢業於牛津大學新學院。1993年，她憑《拯救阿格尼絲》（Saving Agnes）獲得瞭當年惠特布萊特最佳小說處女作奬。2003年，她被《格蘭塔》選為“20名最佳英國小說傢”。

她齣版過九部小說和三本非虛構作品。本書為她第一部非虛構作品。

譯者黃建樹，生於宜昌，現居武漢。現為齣版社文學編輯，業餘時間讀書，買書，譯文，以及養娃。