" To have both motherhood and work was to have two lives instead of one, was a stunning refinement of historical female experience, and to the people who complained that having it all meant doing it all I would have said, yes, of course it does. You don’t get ‘all’ for nothing. ‘Having it all’, like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires the adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise of the fact that she is essentially alone. "

― Rachel Cusk , Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation