The dainty slippers pictured on the cover of “Women’s Work” may have been a marketing ploy on the part of the publisher, but the image is so precious, so trite and so likely to backfire that it deserves extra points for sheer perversity. “My skeleton was being dismantled.”Stack, formerly a war correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, left her plum journalism job in 2011, full of expectation for the child she was about to have and the second book she planned to write. “I imagined long, silent afternoons in spotless rooms, typing clean lines of prose while the baby napped beatifically in a sunbeam,” she recalls. Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but “Women’s Work” dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible. “They were poor women, brown women, migrant women,” she writes.

Source: New York Times April 03, 2019 17:03 UTC