Rachel Cusk is a Novelist with a capital N.
I can tell this because in her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) she intersperses moments of genuine insight with dreadfully overwritten prose. Here’s a sample:
I long for my child, long for her as a sort of double, a tiny pilot boat winging young and certain up the channel ahead of me, guiding the blind, clumsy weight of me through. (211)
In my humble opinion, the only thing blind and clumsy about this passage is its use of metaphor. But I’m being merely subjective on aesthetic grounds: others may find narrative like this moving; for me, the only thing moving is my stomach.
More interesting to me were Cusk’s confidences on the vexations and trials of new motherhood: the shock of becoming an unequal partner, the awkwardness of playgroups, and the decidedly un-natural feeling of ‘natural’ processes such as breastfeeding. Every so often, I thought she really crystallised a feeling or an experience that I shared. Like Cusk, I too chafe somewhat at the invisible bonds of motherhood, and sometimes wish for the freedom to just to do my own thing (even if that thing is nothing much at all). Like Cusk, I feel somewhat irritated by responses to this feeling along the lines of ‘yes, but look at what a wonderful baby you have!‘ (as if that was the problem: you can love your child, but still feel constrained by the constant responsibility of looking after them). Here is how Cusk summarises the problem:
Months after the birth I still found myself affronted and incredulous ... by the fact that I could no longer sleep in or watch a film or spend a Saturday morning reading ... The loss of these things seemed a high price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of a daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort. My loss and my gain were unrelated, were calculated without the aim of some final, ultimate balance. (144-45)
Of course, in the great scheme of things, losing sleep-ins is not really a huge loss (as compared to, say, the loss of a home, job or life), but it is true that motherhood means that your time is not really your own, unless the baby is asleep or with trusted carers. What I found perceptive about this passage was the idea of loss and gain being unrelated, that they don’t balance out. This formulation highlights that while much is gained that is valued and important - a child, a new experience, new insights and so on - much is also lost - a former self, a former way of life, independence, a career - that is also of value. And it should be okay to mourn that, and cherish its significance. Not to do so, in my view, risks trapping women in the myth of sentimentalised motherhood, and denigrating the experience of women who don’t become mothers.
Cusk gestures elsewhere to broader issues of sexual inequality and motherhood. She comments that ‘childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged’ (8) and ‘the biological destiny of women remains standing amidst the ruins of their inequality’ (19) (sidenote: ‘ruins of their inequality’? really?) But these remain cursory gestures at best. Cusk’s persona in this memoir may be ill-at-ease with the narrative of motherhood pre-constructed for her, but her critique remains resolutely at the level of the individual. Rather than take Arminatta Forna’s approach - and that of poet Adrienne Rich, before her - of critiquing the myth and institution of motherhood, Cusk only detours from her anecdotal approach to reconsider literary works such as D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth from her new perspective.
Not that there’s anything wrong with taking an idiosyncratic approach: Anne Enright does that too in the fantastic Making Babies. Where Enright and Cusk differ, however, is that Enright does not attempt to offer ‘the truth’ of her individual experience (and she avoids the purple prose too). Enright holds the reader at a distance even as she delves into her most personal experiences. She also avoids the troubling habit that Cusk has of resorting to imperialist and xenophobic metaphors to explain her experiences: Cusk’s newborn baby is likened to ‘a colony’ (95), and her affront at her loss of independence is seen as the result of ‘some foreign and despicable justice’ (144). Similarly, Cusk’s sardonic tales of tried-and-found-wanting babysitters from Brazil, Spain and Slovenia (143-58), appear oblivious to the national, ethnic and class dimensions of the relationship, and appear to position the reader as sharing her privileged exasperation.
This reader didn’t.
Fortunately, a copy of Rich’s Of Woman Born (1972) has arrived for me at the local library. Perhaps that will offer both the personal and political account of motherhood that Cusk so conspicuously lacks.
