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A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
Multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk’s honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood.
Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary―sort of Apocalypse Baby Now . . . A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.” ― The New York Times Book Review
A Life’s On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself.
An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.
Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary―sort of Apocalypse Baby Now . . . A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.” ― The New York Times Book Review
A Life’s On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself.
An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Rachel Cusk
56 books3,807 followersRachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
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August 20, 2012
Since becoming a mother I have read countless memoirs of motherhood. Some are funny, some are literary, some are candid. Pretty much all of them are trite. I have read some that I loved, but never one I could relate to closely. This, finally, is that book.
Rachel Cusk explains in her introduction that they moved out of London and her husband took care of their children while she wrote this book. To her and her husband I say, every minute of that time was worth this product. Cusk manages to describe her foray into motherhood as something mostly unpleasant (which it actually really is) peppered with good things (which it also is). She explains how pregnancy was a prison sentence, childbirth was anticlimactic, colic and sleepless nights were mindnumbing, breastfeeding was overrated, and caring for a baby is tedious. She does all this without ever having to explain, as most mothers and mother-authors do, that she still loves her baby!!! That it was all worth it!!! No, she doesn't have to say these things. In fact, she says she thinks most people, if they knew what having kids was really like, wouldn't choose to have them at all.
She manages to tell this story without sounding, ever, like she dislikes her children, or resents them, or pities herself. It is the culture we've created, around pregnancy and motherhood and parenting, that she seems to rail against. The mothers around her seem like walking handbooks, unable to tell their own truths because they have already been told for them. She longs to tell her friends she finds nothing good about her new situation as mother, and yet 2 pages later says she misses her daughter's baby years. She is tortured by remnants of her previous, childless self, yet can't bear to leave her daughter with anyone else. This pretty much sums it up.
I love this, a sample of her unapologetic honesty: "To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other...I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them."
Thanks Rachel Cusk, really. It was so very nice to hear someone say it the way it is, instead of the way it ought to be.
Rachel Cusk explains in her introduction that they moved out of London and her husband took care of their children while she wrote this book. To her and her husband I say, every minute of that time was worth this product. Cusk manages to describe her foray into motherhood as something mostly unpleasant (which it actually really is) peppered with good things (which it also is). She explains how pregnancy was a prison sentence, childbirth was anticlimactic, colic and sleepless nights were mindnumbing, breastfeeding was overrated, and caring for a baby is tedious. She does all this without ever having to explain, as most mothers and mother-authors do, that she still loves her baby!!! That it was all worth it!!! No, she doesn't have to say these things. In fact, she says she thinks most people, if they knew what having kids was really like, wouldn't choose to have them at all.
She manages to tell this story without sounding, ever, like she dislikes her children, or resents them, or pities herself. It is the culture we've created, around pregnancy and motherhood and parenting, that she seems to rail against. The mothers around her seem like walking handbooks, unable to tell their own truths because they have already been told for them. She longs to tell her friends she finds nothing good about her new situation as mother, and yet 2 pages later says she misses her daughter's baby years. She is tortured by remnants of her previous, childless self, yet can't bear to leave her daughter with anyone else. This pretty much sums it up.
I love this, a sample of her unapologetic honesty: "To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other...I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them."
Thanks Rachel Cusk, really. It was so very nice to hear someone say it the way it is, instead of the way it ought to be.
February 11, 2020
CORPO A CORPO
A Life’s Work è il titolo originale. Evidentemente non abbastanza incisivo per l’editore italiano (Mondadori) che ne sceglie uno orrendo, ma indicativo: la perdita di sonno all’arrivo di un figlio è automatica – la notte, che prima era oasi di riposo, rifugio, ricarica, diventa un terreno oscuro da attraversare ogni giorno che può riservare sorprese, e segna l’addio al sonno.
E certo questa non è l'unica perdita di libertà, l'unico cambiamento che sconquassa.
Le donne sono cambiate, ma la loro condizione biologica è rimasta inalterata. In questo senso, la maternità diventa una sorta di speciale finestra attraverso la quale è visibile la storia del nostro sesso, ma il cui vetro è assai fragile.
La casa dove abitava Rachel Cusk con suo marito quando è nata la figlia di cui si racconta qui.
La difficoltà di adattamento alla nuova condizione, quella di essere mamma. Non si tratta di depressione post-parto: il discorso di Cusk è più generale. Anche se il riferimento è la sua personale esperienza.
La rabbia di una mamma, la frustrazione, l’ideale di figlio che ora non corrisponde alla realtà, la voglia di liberarsene, i pensieri cattivi, lo stereotipo della madre perfetta che incombe e schiaccia…
Sembra ancora tabù, ma invece è verità.
E tanti padri condividono, ma tacciono.
Tutto ottimo materiale per scrivere un libro pregnante: ma questo, purtroppo, non l’ho trovato tale.
Purtroppo il racconto diventa presto un insistito lamento, e quindi la noia in me lettore ha fatto capolino nonostante io sia un fan di questa scrittrice (Resoconto, Transiti e Arlington Park i tre che ho letto e amato).
Mi sarei aspettato e avrei gradito più riferimenti letterari, e meno cronaca.
Inutile dire che del padre c’è poca e vaga traccia.
È uno dei due saggi di Rachel Cusk, questo dedicato al diventare madre, l’altro alla crisi della coppia, alla separazione dal proprio compagno.
Approccio destrutturato, colloquiale, volendo, controcorrente.
Il libro ha ormai una decina d’anni, e si sentono: perché il tema è tutto meno che controcorrente – la maternità è stata sviscerata, per alcune si sa che è tutto meno che un idillio.
A Life’s Work è il titolo originale. Evidentemente non abbastanza incisivo per l’editore italiano (Mondadori) che ne sceglie uno orrendo, ma indicativo: la perdita di sonno all’arrivo di un figlio è automatica – la notte, che prima era oasi di riposo, rifugio, ricarica, diventa un terreno oscuro da attraversare ogni giorno che può riservare sorprese, e segna l’addio al sonno.
E certo questa non è l'unica perdita di libertà, l'unico cambiamento che sconquassa.
Le donne sono cambiate, ma la loro condizione biologica è rimasta inalterata. In questo senso, la maternità diventa una sorta di speciale finestra attraverso la quale è visibile la storia del nostro sesso, ma il cui vetro è assai fragile.
La casa dove abitava Rachel Cusk con suo marito quando è nata la figlia di cui si racconta qui.
La difficoltà di adattamento alla nuova condizione, quella di essere mamma. Non si tratta di depressione post-parto: il discorso di Cusk è più generale. Anche se il riferimento è la sua personale esperienza.
La rabbia di una mamma, la frustrazione, l’ideale di figlio che ora non corrisponde alla realtà, la voglia di liberarsene, i pensieri cattivi, lo stereotipo della madre perfetta che incombe e schiaccia…
Sembra ancora tabù, ma invece è verità.
E tanti padri condividono, ma tacciono.
Tutto ottimo materiale per scrivere un libro pregnante: ma questo, purtroppo, non l’ho trovato tale.
Purtroppo il racconto diventa presto un insistito lamento, e quindi la noia in me lettore ha fatto capolino nonostante io sia un fan di questa scrittrice (Resoconto, Transiti e Arlington Park i tre che ho letto e amato).
Mi sarei aspettato e avrei gradito più riferimenti letterari, e meno cronaca.
Inutile dire che del padre c’è poca e vaga traccia.
È uno dei due saggi di Rachel Cusk, questo dedicato al diventare madre, l’altro alla crisi della coppia, alla separazione dal proprio compagno.
Approccio destrutturato, colloquiale, volendo, controcorrente.
Il libro ha ormai una decina d’anni, e si sentono: perché il tema è tutto meno che controcorrente – la maternità è stata sviscerata, per alcune si sa che è tutto meno che un idillio.
August 28, 2018
This work was initially published in 2002, and fifteen years later we learn that it had a rocky reception. Womenkind may indeed be split into two irreconcilable halves because I have no idea what could incense people about this book: I laughed through it, and when I wasn’t laughing, I was marking her passages to relate later, so clearly did they capture the ambiguity we feel between love and distress at being so loved and/or needed ourselves.
This memoir of the circumstance surrounding the conception, birth, and first years of a child’s life is really a tight series of essays. Cusk manages to capture moments that illuminate the despair mothers can feel when they discover the true disorientation that comes with bringing the baby home—feelings like cotton wool has supplanted one’s brain and that one cannot find the wherewithal to make a plan—the whole exhaustion of it.
No one really prepared her for the sense of having one’s life hijacked—she admits she’d jumped right over references to children or infants in the writing of those she’d enjoyed before. The children part wasn’t relevant and didn’t matter—a little like me when as a teen I skipped the foreign names in any book I read. I would note the first letter of the name and gauge the length of the word by blurring my eyes. I could distinguish individuals by something distinctive the author had shared about them, so why even bother to learn to pronounce their names?
Cusk’s own story is different than everyone else’s: her daughter “sucks well,” sucking for hours at a time, giving her a short break before starting up again. The nurses she consulted all considered this to be good news, generously praising mother and child for being able to move onto the next phase, bottle-feeding, whenever she had spare hours to sterilize the equipment and make up the formula—or pump and freeze her own milk to put in sterilized bottles.
With motherhood, Cusk has discovered her presence “has accrued a material value, as if I had been fitted with a taxi meter.” There was never any slack, no “lubricant empty hours” in which nothing is planned or paid for. When interviewing babysitters, sometimes she might find herself giving overly-detailed instructions about every aspect of her daughter’s care, as though the caregiver could in some way understand “what it was like to be me.”
A very funny but telling paragraph or two is given over to describing a scene she happened upon one night on a television documentary in which a pampered American housewife admits she would prefer her child get less attention from her South American nanny rather than have the nanny care for the American children as though they were her own: “I’m like, you know, put her down, she knows how to sit in the hot tub!” A hot tub. A baby.
Towards the end of this memoir is a chapter entitled “Don’t Forget to Scream!” about the family’s move to a university town. Mother appears to miss her London life in the way she had missed it when she had the baby. The baby is a toddler now, and when invited to the local play group housed in a church hall, she is manhandled by the other children. Mother could see that successful mothering ventures contained a measure of military organization:
Cusk is out of step, gloriously, and can tell us what we look like, those of us who haven’t stepped back long enough to think about it. The mothers in the university town are older than she is—far older, some grey-haired and pregnant-bellied. This societal change she notes casually but is an observation that should make us sit up and think. Practically everything she says makes me think, which is why I think any one of these chapters would work well as essays—a short sharp strike across the noggin.
The language she employs to describe a year of sleeplessness recalls young men on the front lines in war.
What can I say? She makes me laugh, she makes me think. Her writing electrifies me. Reading Cusk novels and memoirs back to back is pure indulgence.
This memoir of the circumstance surrounding the conception, birth, and first years of a child’s life is really a tight series of essays. Cusk manages to capture moments that illuminate the despair mothers can feel when they discover the true disorientation that comes with bringing the baby home—feelings like cotton wool has supplanted one’s brain and that one cannot find the wherewithal to make a plan—the whole exhaustion of it.
No one really prepared her for the sense of having one’s life hijacked—she admits she’d jumped right over references to children or infants in the writing of those she’d enjoyed before. The children part wasn’t relevant and didn’t matter—a little like me when as a teen I skipped the foreign names in any book I read. I would note the first letter of the name and gauge the length of the word by blurring my eyes. I could distinguish individuals by something distinctive the author had shared about them, so why even bother to learn to pronounce their names?
Cusk’s own story is different than everyone else’s: her daughter “sucks well,” sucking for hours at a time, giving her a short break before starting up again. The nurses she consulted all considered this to be good news, generously praising mother and child for being able to move onto the next phase, bottle-feeding, whenever she had spare hours to sterilize the equipment and make up the formula—or pump and freeze her own milk to put in sterilized bottles.
With motherhood, Cusk has discovered her presence “has accrued a material value, as if I had been fitted with a taxi meter.” There was never any slack, no “lubricant empty hours” in which nothing is planned or paid for. When interviewing babysitters, sometimes she might find herself giving overly-detailed instructions about every aspect of her daughter’s care, as though the caregiver could in some way understand “what it was like to be me.”
A very funny but telling paragraph or two is given over to describing a scene she happened upon one night on a television documentary in which a pampered American housewife admits she would prefer her child get less attention from her South American nanny rather than have the nanny care for the American children as though they were her own: “I’m like, you know, put her down, she knows how to sit in the hot tub!” A hot tub. A baby.
Towards the end of this memoir is a chapter entitled “Don’t Forget to Scream!” about the family’s move to a university town. Mother appears to miss her London life in the way she had missed it when she had the baby. The baby is a toddler now, and when invited to the local play group housed in a church hall, she is manhandled by the other children. Mother could see that successful mothering ventures contained a measure of military organization:
“…conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies…Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams.”The chaos of living among those outside the …hood cannot be found here in the privileged, patriarchal enclave of the university town where everyone asks, “What does your husband do?”
Cusk is out of step, gloriously, and can tell us what we look like, those of us who haven’t stepped back long enough to think about it. The mothers in the university town are older than she is—far older, some grey-haired and pregnant-bellied. This societal change she notes casually but is an observation that should make us sit up and think. Practically everything she says makes me think, which is why I think any one of these chapters would work well as essays—a short sharp strike across the noggin.
The language she employs to describe a year of sleeplessness recalls young men on the front lines in war.
“The muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp…I no longer slept in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins."
What can I say? She makes me laugh, she makes me think. Her writing electrifies me. Reading Cusk novels and memoirs back to back is pure indulgence.
June 20, 2022
I applaud Cusk’s courage to address point blank the dilemmas of maternity, the disenchantement between one’s expectations and the stressful reality that ensues after giving birth to a child.
With the experience still very fresh on my mind, I could easily relate to the blunt honesty of Cusk’s memoir. The sleelpless nights, the pressure and insecurity of breastfeeding, the feeling of displacement and the constant shame of not fully enjoying what is supposed to be the most miraculous and life-changing experience.
She is relentless in her literal description of long days that merge into nights, the infuriating condescension of others and the shocked surprise of childless friends who witness an unexpected transformation from individual to histerical carer.
I smile revisiting certain moments of the past years and recognize myself in those comical snapshots of early motherhood.
But I confess I missed something essential about my understanding of maternity in Cusk’s intimate confession. She focuses on the practical, or rather unpractical aspects of becoming a mother,but she leaves out the eerie bond, wanted or unwanted, between mother and child. The scarce but meaningful moments of a glance, the sudden understanding of it all, the first smile, the rush of emotion of a diminute hand holding one’s finger, the wonder of staring at another human being who is an extension of yourself.
Maybe because maternity came late into my life and I was ready to jump in but the bonding with my daughter defined my own experience of becoming a mother and made up for the more practical, and even mental challenges that I had to adjust to.
Cusk’s memoir openly challenges the romanticized version of motherhood and I celebrate her for that, but there is a whole dimension in terms of mother and child’s connection that she leaves unexplored that I would have loved to read about.
Nonetheless, this is an seminal text to read by those women who have become mothers and to balance out the social misinformation or their innocent expectations.
With the experience still very fresh on my mind, I could easily relate to the blunt honesty of Cusk’s memoir. The sleelpless nights, the pressure and insecurity of breastfeeding, the feeling of displacement and the constant shame of not fully enjoying what is supposed to be the most miraculous and life-changing experience.
She is relentless in her literal description of long days that merge into nights, the infuriating condescension of others and the shocked surprise of childless friends who witness an unexpected transformation from individual to histerical carer.
I smile revisiting certain moments of the past years and recognize myself in those comical snapshots of early motherhood.
But I confess I missed something essential about my understanding of maternity in Cusk’s intimate confession. She focuses on the practical, or rather unpractical aspects of becoming a mother,but she leaves out the eerie bond, wanted or unwanted, between mother and child. The scarce but meaningful moments of a glance, the sudden understanding of it all, the first smile, the rush of emotion of a diminute hand holding one’s finger, the wonder of staring at another human being who is an extension of yourself.
Maybe because maternity came late into my life and I was ready to jump in but the bonding with my daughter defined my own experience of becoming a mother and made up for the more practical, and even mental challenges that I had to adjust to.
Cusk’s memoir openly challenges the romanticized version of motherhood and I celebrate her for that, but there is a whole dimension in terms of mother and child’s connection that she leaves unexplored that I would have loved to read about.
Nonetheless, this is an seminal text to read by those women who have become mothers and to balance out the social misinformation or their innocent expectations.
Want to read
November 27, 2023addicted to literary books about motherhood
July 6, 2022
All the crazyness, and tenderness of the first months of being a new mom. Cusk is always a delight. I laughed and remembered those first few months of my daughters life, welcome to the jungle!
October 6, 2021
To be honest, I don’t think I ever thought much about motherhood and what it entails, till I myself became a mother. The event was an eye opener, literally. And what I did think at the time of my pregnancy and then being a new mother, has now found an echo in Cusk’s memoir. She writes about her own experience and she does it with such honesty and straightforwardness that you cannot help but gasp, at certain moments, because it is so rare to find words expressing your own emotions.
Being a new mother is not easy, especially the first time. Apart from the known physical exhaustion, which does disrupt the normal routine she always took for granted before child birth, it is the mental stress, the anxiety which becomes her constant companion after that. For one, she is tired, like all the time, and afraid if she is doing it right by her child. She feels contradictory emotions – a sort of bewilderment at first, then love, even frustration and then remorse for feeling frustrated. She wishes for some time for herself, to take care of her own being and when she is away from her child, she feels tormented because she doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of her child the way she thinks she can.
I have gone through these emotions too. And frankly, the love and attachment came later. I was mostly overwhelmed because besides taking care of a child as a first time mother, I was also confronted with a difficult family situation. It still gives me shivers to remember those days.
Reading A Life’s Work has kind of given validity to my thoughts. To think that I am not alone in thinking the way I did, is a relief. To be able to write about it as she did, a freedom of mind I wish I had when I was that young. It is liberating, the reading of this book.
Cusk has agency, she is aware of her own emotions, she can think, write and get published. She can be heard. I know of so many women who are so conditioned in the established structure that even the idea of thinking for themselves must be alien to them. What still makes this memoir a very powerful one for me is that Cusk is searingly honest about what she has felt and gone through. She has put her heart out for everyone to see. This is brave enough. That she has given a voice to sometimes latent or maybe unspeakable feelings of many others, is much admirable.
Being a new mother is not easy, especially the first time. Apart from the known physical exhaustion, which does disrupt the normal routine she always took for granted before child birth, it is the mental stress, the anxiety which becomes her constant companion after that. For one, she is tired, like all the time, and afraid if she is doing it right by her child. She feels contradictory emotions – a sort of bewilderment at first, then love, even frustration and then remorse for feeling frustrated. She wishes for some time for herself, to take care of her own being and when she is away from her child, she feels tormented because she doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of her child the way she thinks she can.
I have gone through these emotions too. And frankly, the love and attachment came later. I was mostly overwhelmed because besides taking care of a child as a first time mother, I was also confronted with a difficult family situation. It still gives me shivers to remember those days.
Reading A Life’s Work has kind of given validity to my thoughts. To think that I am not alone in thinking the way I did, is a relief. To be able to write about it as she did, a freedom of mind I wish I had when I was that young. It is liberating, the reading of this book.
Cusk has agency, she is aware of her own emotions, she can think, write and get published. She can be heard. I know of so many women who are so conditioned in the established structure that even the idea of thinking for themselves must be alien to them. What still makes this memoir a very powerful one for me is that Cusk is searingly honest about what she has felt and gone through. She has put her heart out for everyone to see. This is brave enough. That she has given a voice to sometimes latent or maybe unspeakable feelings of many others, is much admirable.
March 22, 2022
An honest meditation on motherhood from one of the greats. Cusk could write about anything and I'd read it; I mean, I read an entire essay collection about motherhood, something I will literally never experience. Yet she made it so interesting and engaging because she tells her story so authentically. She doesn't sugarcoat parenthood and also isn't afraid to curb tradition in order to express the more unsavory parts of being a mother. These are great essays about everything from childbirth to suburbia, as Cusk navigates the first year or so of motherhood.
August 19, 2012
The truth is, it's rough having a baby. I love him -- but regardless of how I love him, and no matter how much people say your love for him will make it so you love doing laundry, changing dirty diapers and pacing the floor at night -- I HATE doing laundry, changing dirty diapers and pacing the floor at night. I hate that I do those things 90% of the time I'm awake, and gone gone gone are my moments to sleep or to read or to enjoy television or eat dinner without someone screaming and putting their fingers in my mouth... And what's made it all worse is that it's totally taboo in our society so say any of these things, even to your husband, without being labeled "depressed" or "strange."
This was a great book because Rachel helped tell the story the way I've experienced it, and to explain exactly why these feelings DO NOT mean I'm depressed or strange. I'm not a different person. I just had a child. Now I'm split in two, and that other part of me that I knew so well is smaller and smaller and it's hard to adjust. Reading what she had to say made me feel normal again, and I highly recommend it to any mother who is having trouble making the transition.
This was a great book because Rachel helped tell the story the way I've experienced it, and to explain exactly why these feelings DO NOT mean I'm depressed or strange. I'm not a different person. I just had a child. Now I'm split in two, and that other part of me that I knew so well is smaller and smaller and it's hard to adjust. Reading what she had to say made me feel normal again, and I highly recommend it to any mother who is having trouble making the transition.
May 12, 2018
Recently a much younger friend had a baby and—not having had any luck myself—I decided to read Rachel Cusk’s memoir to find out what that “apparently normal and yet entirely unintelligible experience” might be like. From the first page of the Introduction I was hooked: Cusk’s is an acutely observed account of her passage through pregnancy, childbirth, and the first year of her daughter’s life.
Cusk’s ability to find words to express her experiences is impressive:
She notices that “my desire for her sufficiency is in fact my own, my own desire to be sufficient to another”. As Cusk’s daughter enters her second year and “finally we are able to converse, I find her decided, fully formed, already beyond the reach of persuasion.”
Cusk is also very good on mothers in literature. One example:
Other reviews have emphasised Cusk's frank descriptions of always-on breast-feeding and relentless sleep-deprivation; but happily there is much more to her memoir than this.
Cusk’s ability to find words to express her experiences is impressive:
One evening, sitting outside in the garden in the dusk, I realise that three months have passed and that summer has come. My daughter is lying on a rug looking at the leaves above her. She wriggles and kicks her legs and laughs at things that I can’t see. […] I see that she has become somebody. I realise, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. […] All that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all’ that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else, being ready to drop everything.
She notices that “my desire for her sufficiency is in fact my own, my own desire to be sufficient to another”. As Cusk’s daughter enters her second year and “finally we are able to converse, I find her decided, fully formed, already beyond the reach of persuasion.”
Cusk is also very good on mothers in literature. One example:
As a sequel to youth, beauty or independence, motherhood promises from its first page to be a longer and more difficult volume: the story of how Tolstoy’s Natasha turned from a trilling, beribboned heartbreaker into inscrutable matriarch, of how daughters become parents and heroines implacable opponents of the romantic plot. Tolstoy did not write this volume. Instead he wrote Anna Karenina, excavating the woman extant in the mother and demonstrating her power to destroy, for motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence….There are illuminating discussions of (among others) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, and Coleridge’s beautiful “Frost At Midnight”, in which the poet finds that “Parenthood is redemptive, transformative, creative. It is the means by which the self’s limits are broken open and entrance found to a greater landscape.”
Other reviews have emphasised Cusk's frank descriptions of always-on breast-feeding and relentless sleep-deprivation; but happily there is much more to her memoir than this.
June 9, 2021
I thought this w as a very good book in which Rachel Cusk takes us through her pregnancy and then about a year after the birth in which she raises her child. I don’t think she ever gives us the girl’s name (actually I just read the NY Times review and it was stated in the Introduction, Albertine, but only there).
I sure am late to reading some books. This was written in 2001…
Some of the things she talked about in the book really resonated with me. The troubles of finding good childcare. We always had trouble with that. Sleep, or the lack thereof, on the caregiver’s part.
I liked the writing. Here’s an example…
• My daughter’s pure and pearly being requires considerable maintenance. At first my relation to it is that of a kidney. I process its waste. Every three hours I put milk into her mouth. It goes around a series of tubes and then comes out again. I dispose of it. Every twenty-four hours I immerse her in water and clean her. I change her clothes. When she has been inside for a period of time I take her outside. When she has been outside for a period of time I take her in. When she goes to sleep I put her down. When she awakes I pick her up. When she cries I walk around with her until she stops. I add and subtract clothes. I water her with love, worrying that I am giving her too much or too little.
Rachel Cusk, in the books I have read so far (her trilogy), seems to have a penchant or a need to describe people in sometimes unflattering ways. Damn if she didn’t do it in this book!
• Bearded men with broad, womanish hips dressed all in beige plodded past our window, walking small, yappy dogs.
• Such women had no fear of ridicule or rebuke as they pedaled on in their summer dresses, baskets creaking, showing the white slabs of their arms…
• They were a strange group, ill-fitted for the hedonism at which they strained: the boys were spotty and beak-nosed, the girls dumpy and bespectacled.
• Over at the coffee station, a broad woman with a vast bosom and a brutal helmet of grey hair asked me how many children I had.
• When we rang the doorbell she had burst forth, dressed like a plain-clothed nun…
Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
• https://literarymama.com/articles/dep...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/bo...
I sure am late to reading some books. This was written in 2001…
Some of the things she talked about in the book really resonated with me. The troubles of finding good childcare. We always had trouble with that. Sleep, or the lack thereof, on the caregiver’s part.
I liked the writing. Here’s an example…
• My daughter’s pure and pearly being requires considerable maintenance. At first my relation to it is that of a kidney. I process its waste. Every three hours I put milk into her mouth. It goes around a series of tubes and then comes out again. I dispose of it. Every twenty-four hours I immerse her in water and clean her. I change her clothes. When she has been inside for a period of time I take her outside. When she has been outside for a period of time I take her in. When she goes to sleep I put her down. When she awakes I pick her up. When she cries I walk around with her until she stops. I add and subtract clothes. I water her with love, worrying that I am giving her too much or too little.
Rachel Cusk, in the books I have read so far (her trilogy), seems to have a penchant or a need to describe people in sometimes unflattering ways. Damn if she didn’t do it in this book!
• Bearded men with broad, womanish hips dressed all in beige plodded past our window, walking small, yappy dogs.
• Such women had no fear of ridicule or rebuke as they pedaled on in their summer dresses, baskets creaking, showing the white slabs of their arms…
• They were a strange group, ill-fitted for the hedonism at which they strained: the boys were spotty and beak-nosed, the girls dumpy and bespectacled.
• Over at the coffee station, a broad woman with a vast bosom and a brutal helmet of grey hair asked me how many children I had.
• When we rang the doorbell she had burst forth, dressed like a plain-clothed nun…
Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
• https://literarymama.com/articles/dep...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/bo...
November 22, 2019
Nachdem Cusk auch in Deutschland mit ihrer Outline-Trilogie bekannt geworden ist, war ich gespannt auf dieses frühe Buch von ihr, das – so behaupten viele Kritiker – ihr bei Erscheinen den Hass vieler Leser eingebracht habe.
Grund dafür ist, dass Cusk hier recht schonungslos ihre erste Schwangerschaft und das Jahr danach beschreibt, mit all den damit einhergehenden sich widersprechenden Gefühlen. Dem Wunsch beschützen zu wollen und die Verzweiflung über die verlorene Freiheit, die ein Kind bedeutet. Die Schlaflosigkeit. Die Ahnungslosigkeit, mit der man sich auf dieses Abenteuer einlässt. Die Unmöglichkeit, so manche Erfahrung mit anderen zu teilen, denn was Mütter zu fühlen haben, das geben Erziehungsratgeber und soziales Umfeld vor.
Gut gefiel mir auch, dass sich Cusk immer auch auf Grundlage von Literatur ihrer Situation nähert. Das beinhaltet wiedergelesene Klassiker genauso wie die Ratgeberliteratur für Eltern und deren ganze Widersprüchlichkeit und Lebensfremdheit. Auch geht sie darauf ein, wie sehr die Erfahrung der Mutterschaft sie Literatur ganz anders lesen lässt.
Ich halte Lebenswerk für ein sehr gelungenes, gut geschriebenes, ehrliches Buch. Warum es bei seinem Erscheinen vor 18 Jahren so eine Empörung hervorgerufen haben soll, mag ich aber kaum zu verstehen. Entweder ist der Mythos der selbstlosen Mutter nicht ausrottbar oder in den letzten 18 Jahren hat sich unsere Gesellschaft doch ein Stück weit bewegt, sodass das Buch heute weniger kritisch gelesen wird.
Grund dafür ist, dass Cusk hier recht schonungslos ihre erste Schwangerschaft und das Jahr danach beschreibt, mit all den damit einhergehenden sich widersprechenden Gefühlen. Dem Wunsch beschützen zu wollen und die Verzweiflung über die verlorene Freiheit, die ein Kind bedeutet. Die Schlaflosigkeit. Die Ahnungslosigkeit, mit der man sich auf dieses Abenteuer einlässt. Die Unmöglichkeit, so manche Erfahrung mit anderen zu teilen, denn was Mütter zu fühlen haben, das geben Erziehungsratgeber und soziales Umfeld vor.
Gut gefiel mir auch, dass sich Cusk immer auch auf Grundlage von Literatur ihrer Situation nähert. Das beinhaltet wiedergelesene Klassiker genauso wie die Ratgeberliteratur für Eltern und deren ganze Widersprüchlichkeit und Lebensfremdheit. Auch geht sie darauf ein, wie sehr die Erfahrung der Mutterschaft sie Literatur ganz anders lesen lässt.
Ich halte Lebenswerk für ein sehr gelungenes, gut geschriebenes, ehrliches Buch. Warum es bei seinem Erscheinen vor 18 Jahren so eine Empörung hervorgerufen haben soll, mag ich aber kaum zu verstehen. Entweder ist der Mythos der selbstlosen Mutter nicht ausrottbar oder in den letzten 18 Jahren hat sich unsere Gesellschaft doch ein Stück weit bewegt, sodass das Buch heute weniger kritisch gelesen wird.
October 16, 2018
“To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.”
A deeply melancholy and yet beautifully written account of early motherhood. Cusk hates being a mother and fails to find anything joyful or redemptive in the vocation. There is an element of bravery to the book, I suppose, to witness Cusk saying such dark things that many mothers probably feel but never admit. But I found myself, as a non-mother, frequently thinking of Cusk’s real daughter and what she would feel were she to read this book: How wounding to hear your mother tell the world that you caused her a lifetime of rage and suffering; that she saw you as her prison warden, as a bodysnatcher; that you only brought her grief and angst. I don’t fault Cusk for sharing so honestly. But I did feel a rising measure of sympathy for her actual child. And I’m not sure who this book is for: It seems inadvisable to give it to a new mother, who could be battling postpartum depression (which this book would just confirm and nearly encourage), and it also seems inadvisable to share it with an expectant mother, for whom it would read as a damning warning of the hellscape that awaits. Rather unsure what to think about this one. It’s gloomy and scary; it makes your heart hurt for Cusk’s raw, depressive state and makes you want to look up the number of a London therapist to send her immediately.
November 18, 2016
At times I really liked the writing in this book, but on the whole, I much prefer Cusk's fiction. There's an unrelenting whininess to the book, in spite of the fantastic sentences. My memories of pregnancy and the first year with both of my sons are so utterly different from Cusk's. Even her deep sense of connection with her new daughter feels overwrought, well actually, it, too, feels downright whiny. I kept reading because the sentences truly are dazzling. Here's an example: "Feeding, I tell the baby, is not a substitute for living. Feeding is an overloaded socket that is growing hot and dangerous, as every day the voltage passing through it increase.
In spite of all this, her weight gain is slow. It does indeed seem impossible to overfeed a breastfed baby. I have indeed tried. I try to see things from her point of view. Every time she cries, nmy breasts appear like prison warders investigating a disturbance, two dumb, moonfaced henchmen, closing in on her, silencing her, administering opiates."
I also have a problem with the fact that she rarely mentions the father of this baby, who at the time was her husband. In fact, they move out of London...guess what...she complains about her new neighborhood, too. And she neglects to tell us that her husband gives up his job and takes care of both young daughters (there are now two), so that she can write the book. This woman needs to keep a gratitude journal.
In spite of all this, her weight gain is slow. It does indeed seem impossible to overfeed a breastfed baby. I have indeed tried. I try to see things from her point of view. Every time she cries, nmy breasts appear like prison warders investigating a disturbance, two dumb, moonfaced henchmen, closing in on her, silencing her, administering opiates."
I also have a problem with the fact that she rarely mentions the father of this baby, who at the time was her husband. In fact, they move out of London...guess what...she complains about her new neighborhood, too. And she neglects to tell us that her husband gives up his job and takes care of both young daughters (there are now two), so that she can write the book. This woman needs to keep a gratitude journal.
April 23, 2022
I remember my children's babyhoods clearly and with sentiment but not great sentimentality. I found my first child's babyhood so difficult that I had my next child 18 months later in order to get all the baby stuff over and done with in one fell swoop. Rachel Cusk writes beautifully and precisely but presents the most unrelentingly negative vision of motherhood I have ever read. It's as though all my difficult moments as a mother of babies were condensed into two hundred pages with none of the moments of humor, joy, sensual pleasure of being alive with these little beings clinging to my head and limbs, or aesthetic pleasure of drinking in the beauty of these demanding little beings.
Cusk reaches for the most negative and extreme metaphors: her crawling daughter resembles an escaped zoo animal, for instance, and not in a good way. As a woman, she seems trapped within herself and disconnected from everyone else. She lives with the baby's father yet takes no pleasure in his company, and describes men caring for children on Saturday mornings with emasculating images. She even finds fault with the thick white arms of the too sexless women who ride their bicycles down her road. What a crab! What a great writer! What a dreadful person to be trapped inside of!
So I am glad to be done with this book. I feel like one of those bicyclists with the thick arms breezing by her house: “She's always so sour. I'll go visit my cheerful friend Penelope instead." Brave though it was of Cusk to capture the seismic shift from unfettered woman of the world to the trapped prisoner of a baby and her needs, Cusk has stepped into her enclosed room of a life with her baby, then slammed and locked herself in, taking the reader with her. I am now glad to be out, never going back!
Cusk reaches for the most negative and extreme metaphors: her crawling daughter resembles an escaped zoo animal, for instance, and not in a good way. As a woman, she seems trapped within herself and disconnected from everyone else. She lives with the baby's father yet takes no pleasure in his company, and describes men caring for children on Saturday mornings with emasculating images. She even finds fault with the thick white arms of the too sexless women who ride their bicycles down her road. What a crab! What a great writer! What a dreadful person to be trapped inside of!
So I am glad to be done with this book. I feel like one of those bicyclists with the thick arms breezing by her house: “She's always so sour. I'll go visit my cheerful friend Penelope instead." Brave though it was of Cusk to capture the seismic shift from unfettered woman of the world to the trapped prisoner of a baby and her needs, Cusk has stepped into her enclosed room of a life with her baby, then slammed and locked herself in, taking the reader with her. I am now glad to be out, never going back!
October 26, 2011
There are so many 'celebrity baby books' out there, none of which I would touch with a barge pole, with their soft-focus vomit-inducing coochie-coochie-coo. I don't even fancy those matey ones that slap their thighs, wink and hoot 'What am I like....' whilst recounting a string of sanitised 'parenting fail' moments. This is different. This one looks you in the eye with a dangerously frank expression and says 'no, I really am crap at parenting'.
Clearly pregnancy did not addle Ms Cusk's brain. I was reaching for my dictionary by page 2 (would not have expected anything less, having read much of her excellent fiction). It is intelligent, incisive, thoughr provoking. It dares to say things other books don't, and there were many sections that struck a chord with me, notably the description of a caesarean, and the worry afterwards: "...in truth my experience of birth was more like the experience of having an appendix removed than what most people would understand by 'labour'. Without its connecting hours, the glue of its pain, the literalness of its passage, I fear that I will not make it to motherhood.'
Some sections are conventionally amusing, such as the scene at the breastfeeding clinic, or the tale of being wrong-footed by a toddler group clique. And she is disparaging about almost all the health professionals she encounters: "A health visitor came to see us in our embattled kitchen. She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag, undetected'.
There is perhaps a sniffy air about the narrative that might put some readers off. What comes across at times is a highly intellectual woman in a situation where intellect has little or no bearing. It confers no special status. Women with lower IQs might well be better at it. Probably not intentional. There is a type of mum she is addressing, though: the ones who, like her, don't identify with the eareth mothers they read about in books, or feel cheated by the homogenity of the 'propaganda' handed out by midwives. Her assessment of 'Emma's Diary', which I was also given on an antenatal visit and which still sits on my bookshelf, was savagely amusing. To admit you sympathise, or even agree with her observations is to place yourself outside the Sisterhood, but I guess there are people out there who will, and I count myself among their number.
I knew the book was controversial. That was part of the attraction for me. There is a brave honesty in many of the events and feelings she recounts. Many will not approve. But I think if there is a cause for concern in there it is the striking similarity between the narrative tone of this, and the voice of Eva in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'. Now that really is a scary thought.
Clearly pregnancy did not addle Ms Cusk's brain. I was reaching for my dictionary by page 2 (would not have expected anything less, having read much of her excellent fiction). It is intelligent, incisive, thoughr provoking. It dares to say things other books don't, and there were many sections that struck a chord with me, notably the description of a caesarean, and the worry afterwards: "...in truth my experience of birth was more like the experience of having an appendix removed than what most people would understand by 'labour'. Without its connecting hours, the glue of its pain, the literalness of its passage, I fear that I will not make it to motherhood.'
Some sections are conventionally amusing, such as the scene at the breastfeeding clinic, or the tale of being wrong-footed by a toddler group clique. And she is disparaging about almost all the health professionals she encounters: "A health visitor came to see us in our embattled kitchen. She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag, undetected'.
There is perhaps a sniffy air about the narrative that might put some readers off. What comes across at times is a highly intellectual woman in a situation where intellect has little or no bearing. It confers no special status. Women with lower IQs might well be better at it. Probably not intentional. There is a type of mum she is addressing, though: the ones who, like her, don't identify with the eareth mothers they read about in books, or feel cheated by the homogenity of the 'propaganda' handed out by midwives. Her assessment of 'Emma's Diary', which I was also given on an antenatal visit and which still sits on my bookshelf, was savagely amusing. To admit you sympathise, or even agree with her observations is to place yourself outside the Sisterhood, but I guess there are people out there who will, and I count myself among their number.
I knew the book was controversial. That was part of the attraction for me. There is a brave honesty in many of the events and feelings she recounts. Many will not approve. But I think if there is a cause for concern in there it is the striking similarity between the narrative tone of this, and the voice of Eva in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'. Now that really is a scary thought.
January 19, 2023
Lo stile di Cusk è esagerato, oltremodo pretenzioso. Pieno di fronzoli inutili e paragoni senza senso, che riescono solo a far perdere il filo del discorso al lettore.
Sembra più un esercizio di stile che un racconto dell’esperienza di maternità.
È un tema che mi ha sempre suscitato grande interesse, ho portato avanti e terminato la lettura unicamente per tale motivo.
Non interamente da buttare ma decisamente noioso e, per quanto riguarda la scrittura, decisamente “troppo”.
Sembra più un esercizio di stile che un racconto dell’esperienza di maternità.
È un tema che mi ha sempre suscitato grande interesse, ho portato avanti e terminato la lettura unicamente per tale motivo.
Non interamente da buttare ma decisamente noioso e, per quanto riguarda la scrittura, decisamente “troppo”.
May 11, 2008
This is the most beautiful and the most honest book about pregnancy and motherhood that I have read. At nearly every pass I found myself saying, "Yes, exactly, that's it precisely."
Cusk describes the condition and the character of motherhood with candor and vision and clarity; it's like reading some long-forgotten Virginia Woolf novel, with every predicament of motherhood more carefully revealed than you would have thought possible, and those moments presented with such immediacy and such a sense of tone that it's difficult to imagine Cusk writing outside of the moment itself.
Though her work testifies to the extraordinary challenges to identity motherhood poses, she seems a writer of total confidence and bravery. She brings her considerable mind to bear on all of the modern trappings of parenthood: breastfeeding, mom-and-baby groups, work, the fuzzy area of domestic partnership, sleep training, etc. I just wish she had written more about her c-section, if only because hearing her thoughts on the horribly perfunctory matter of medicalised birth might have made me feel better about my own c/s.
But that's the effect of this work; what goes unremarked seems a shame and a loss. You'd like to have this voice return for the preschool years and beyond.
Cusk describes the condition and the character of motherhood with candor and vision and clarity; it's like reading some long-forgotten Virginia Woolf novel, with every predicament of motherhood more carefully revealed than you would have thought possible, and those moments presented with such immediacy and such a sense of tone that it's difficult to imagine Cusk writing outside of the moment itself.
Though her work testifies to the extraordinary challenges to identity motherhood poses, she seems a writer of total confidence and bravery. She brings her considerable mind to bear on all of the modern trappings of parenthood: breastfeeding, mom-and-baby groups, work, the fuzzy area of domestic partnership, sleep training, etc. I just wish she had written more about her c-section, if only because hearing her thoughts on the horribly perfunctory matter of medicalised birth might have made me feel better about my own c/s.
But that's the effect of this work; what goes unremarked seems a shame and a loss. You'd like to have this voice return for the preschool years and beyond.
April 11, 2021
motherhood is such an explosive topic, and society - mostly, women themselves though - constantly comes up with new impossible expectations for other women when they become mothers. thus, there is a need for an antidote, and this is one of them - an honest recollection of how confusing and challenging motherhood can be like!
every time i read a book by Rachel Cusk, my admiration for her as a person, a thinker, and a writer goes through exponential growth.
every time i read a book by Rachel Cusk, my admiration for her as a person, a thinker, and a writer goes through exponential growth.
January 31, 2023
Tenía muchas ganas de leer algo así. Las luces y las sombras de la maternidad contadas en primera persona y en caliente.
May 25, 2021
As far as books on motherhood go, this was perfection. If you are not a new parent, like myself, it is a fresh and lively reminder of the dark and challenging times that comes with raising a baby. If you're not raising a child, it's a glimpse into another dimension—the surreal, alternate universe that a new parent must traverse. It is the first I have read of Rachel Cusk, despite having many of her books on my to-read-soon list, and I am ever more eager to read her fiction. She is witty and brutally honest. Her imagery is delightfully colourful and at times, laugh-out-loud funny.
With my daughter's sixth birthday quickly approaching, this was the exact book I needed to remind myself of the remarkably difficult stage early parenthood was; it provided me a chance to reflect on the trauma of birth, the ostensible endlessness of sleep deprivation, and the frenzy of keeping a little creature alive. I also recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what it would be like to be a new parent, even if one doesn't plan on raising a child—the insight will provide enlightenment as well as compassion for what all parents experience in one way or another.
With my daughter's sixth birthday quickly approaching, this was the exact book I needed to remind myself of the remarkably difficult stage early parenthood was; it provided me a chance to reflect on the trauma of birth, the ostensible endlessness of sleep deprivation, and the frenzy of keeping a little creature alive. I also recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what it would be like to be a new parent, even if one doesn't plan on raising a child—the insight will provide enlightenment as well as compassion for what all parents experience in one way or another.
April 19, 2021
I find the initial reactions to this book (when published in 2002) seriously puzzling. Journalists who called Cusk an unfitting or unloving mother have either completely misunderstood the book or completely misunderstood the nature of motherhood. Possibly both. I can confirm that being a mother is not a state of unending bliss; perhaps there are mothers for whom love is always absolute and undisturbed by other feelings, but I don't know them. If a woman with a complex inner life is going to write about motherhood, the result is inevitably going to be complex too. I hope that the reaction to A Life's Work would be different today, but who knows. Any ambiguity on this topic still seems to generate outrage or at least ill-concealed disapproval.
I must say, though, that I am also puzzled by those who gush how beautiful Cusk's writing is in this book. Sure, she writes very well and there are passages that I might classify as 'beautiful' in a traditional sense. But beauty is not, in my view, a central feature of her style. She is often at her most effective when she is slightly awkward, sometimes there is a curious, perhaps mocking formality to her words. She is aloof, self-absorbed, suspicious of convention, suspicious of everything, really. So one doesn't go to Cusk - or at least I don't - for beauty.
To me, Cusk is about the voice, the mood. It's not that I want to be like her or want to see the world as she does or that I love everything she writes, but I find it somehow extremely comforting that her way of being in the world exists, that it's possible to be a woman like her. This is, I assume, also why I prefer her non-fiction to her fiction: it is not the stories she creates that I'm interested in, it's herself.
I must say, though, that I am also puzzled by those who gush how beautiful Cusk's writing is in this book. Sure, she writes very well and there are passages that I might classify as 'beautiful' in a traditional sense. But beauty is not, in my view, a central feature of her style. She is often at her most effective when she is slightly awkward, sometimes there is a curious, perhaps mocking formality to her words. She is aloof, self-absorbed, suspicious of convention, suspicious of everything, really. So one doesn't go to Cusk - or at least I don't - for beauty.
To me, Cusk is about the voice, the mood. It's not that I want to be like her or want to see the world as she does or that I love everything she writes, but I find it somehow extremely comforting that her way of being in the world exists, that it's possible to be a woman like her. This is, I assume, also why I prefer her non-fiction to her fiction: it is not the stories she creates that I'm interested in, it's herself.
January 30, 2022
I loved this book, but I'm glad I read it when my children are no longer babies. I think it would have been way too close to home then. So many thoughts and quotes that resonated with my experience of motherhood--hard to pick just one, but this one captures something about motherhood that continues even as your children grow older and self-sufficient and so remains more applicable to me at this stage of life than some of her sharp observations about mothering an infant:
"When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle."
"When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle."
January 5, 2015
This is such a quirky memoir. I’m starting to think maybe it’s an English thing, to be terribly quirky, but then every good English writer I read reinvents quirkiness anew (and still I can sense some shared sensibility amongst them). My own experience of motherhood is very different from that of Cusk, but I didn’t read this book to get validation for my own life or not even so much to think more about motherhood. This book looks so strangely at the familiar that it could have been written about anything really and be just as worth reading. I read it to learn about freshness of point of view… Cusk is a true intellectual in the best sense of this word.
May 4, 2009
A lot of her language feels needlessly complicated. I found some of her experience reassuring, but mostly found it hard to sympathise with her. Thought the introduction was the best bit of the book.
December 30, 2022
تقریبا " همه احساسات بیان شده یک مادرامروزی را به درستی بیان میکند ولی برای من اغراق آمیزبود. من که با دانشجویی و اشتغال وجنگ و...مادری هم میکردم ، شاید آنقدری وقت برای فلسفه زندگی نداشتم .
مادریا پدرشدن ازدید من مسئولیتی تمام وقت وتمام عمراست واگرکسی حاضربه آن نیست حتما" نبایستی بچه دارشود.
واگرشدی آه وناله وفلسفه بافی زیاده است .
مادریا پدرشدن ازدید من مسئولیتی تمام وقت وتمام عمراست واگرکسی حاضربه آن نیست حتما" نبایستی بچه دارشود.
واگرشدی آه وناله وفلسفه بافی زیاده است .
October 31, 2022
Powerful as a blazing furnace, emotionally, in addition to intelligent, literate, and witty: I devoured all 200+ pages in a single day. Based on all the controversy surrounding this book, all the outraged reviews/hot-takes/thinkpieces, I expected A Life's Work to be unrelentingly serious, but there are many laugh-out-loud hilarious moments, too. I want to hold onto the lesson of the chapter titled "Hell's Kitchen," where the speaker is lifted out of an emotional nadir by reading the Coleridge poem "Frost at Midnight." Times can get hard, brutally so, but maintaining a tether to poetry, to literature, can provide a lifeline. And books, because they may be read aloud (as in the chapter "Extra Fox"), can offer an opportunity for connecting not just with one's past and present selves but with one's child, too.
January 17, 2023
I met my Aunt for dinner shortly after buying this novel. My Aunt is guileless, earnest, naive; she rarely reads and had never heard of Rachel Cusk before. In many ways she is the kind of woman susceptible to the mawkish, condescending paraphernalia about motherhood relentlessly marketed to women by sources as diverse as self-help novels, Hollywood and the National Health Service, parodied so dryly and pellucidly by Cusk in the memoir. My Aunt asked me what the book was about. I offered a potted summary, explaining that Cusk's attempt to put words to the kind of wholesale dissolution of self that was her experience of early parenthood was ruthlessly denigrated by the reading public, who condemned what they saw as her cold-heartedness, her narcissism, her heedless individualism. My Aunt was confused at this strain of criticism.
'I just don't understand that, Maya', she said breathlessly. 'The truth is, being a parent is really hard'.
There is a brilliant essay in 'Coventry' - a collection released 18 years after the publication of 'A Life's Work' - in which Cusk subverts the cliched 'Why I Write' piece by interrogating, not why she herself writes, by why others seem to want to, and why she is willing to teach them. In it, she explains that the desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language - to surmount, and perhaps destroy completely, that pervasive chasm between our internal experience of self and the 'false' (or at least incomplete) self we present externally. In other words, language pursues truth; it is the medium through which the falsity, fiction and fabrication we use to regulate and narrativise our lives can be rubbed off, exposed. If Cusk is correct (as I think she is) and this is indeed the tacitly agreed upon purpose of writing, then 'A Life's Work' is remarkable in how assiduously and successfully it pursues its goal. And the criticism of it - that it is vain, alternatively self-absorbed and self-effacing, an affront to mothers and children everywhere - seems in many ways to be a criminal attempt to cover up what myself and my Aunt and Cusk and many other women understand to be, if not THE truth, then at least A truth worth telling.
'I just don't understand that, Maya', she said breathlessly. 'The truth is, being a parent is really hard'.
There is a brilliant essay in 'Coventry' - a collection released 18 years after the publication of 'A Life's Work' - in which Cusk subverts the cliched 'Why I Write' piece by interrogating, not why she herself writes, by why others seem to want to, and why she is willing to teach them. In it, she explains that the desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language - to surmount, and perhaps destroy completely, that pervasive chasm between our internal experience of self and the 'false' (or at least incomplete) self we present externally. In other words, language pursues truth; it is the medium through which the falsity, fiction and fabrication we use to regulate and narrativise our lives can be rubbed off, exposed. If Cusk is correct (as I think she is) and this is indeed the tacitly agreed upon purpose of writing, then 'A Life's Work' is remarkable in how assiduously and successfully it pursues its goal. And the criticism of it - that it is vain, alternatively self-absorbed and self-effacing, an affront to mothers and children everywhere - seems in many ways to be a criminal attempt to cover up what myself and my Aunt and Cusk and many other women understand to be, if not THE truth, then at least A truth worth telling.
October 20, 2020
My favorite Rachel Cusk! This was a poignant portrait of motherhood, unafraid to reveal its ugliness. Cusk confirmed what I've always imagined motherhood to be- maddening and exhausting and a constant surprise at what the female body can endure and the love it can feel and give.
There was a passage about rediscovering books as the author began reading out loud to her daughter. This is a practice I have always looked forward to and reading Cusk's words about revisiting her favorite novels moved me to tears. There is so much fear I associate with motherhood and an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. Reading this illustrated a new joy I had never considered and now wholeheartedly anticipate:
I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like pots and pans, the hoarded gold of previous civilisations, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.
There was a passage about rediscovering books as the author began reading out loud to her daughter. This is a practice I have always looked forward to and reading Cusk's words about revisiting her favorite novels moved me to tears. There is so much fear I associate with motherhood and an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. Reading this illustrated a new joy I had never considered and now wholeheartedly anticipate:
I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like pots and pans, the hoarded gold of previous civilisations, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.
August 17, 2012
Drawn by its subversive sepia cover, I plucked this memoir off a bookstore shelf during pregnancy because frankly, all the pink books with pictures of smiling mothers and babies were enough to provoke the baby blues before even giving birth! Cusk’s two young daughters are rolled into one anonymous being to protect their privacy in the book, in which Cusk recounts personal anecdotes of new motherhood in glorious detail.
Rachel Cusk’s story lived up to its cover promise of being ‘as compulsive as a thriller’. At the time, I had no idea that this book was seen as controversial and I still don’t understand why. Here is a woman telling her truth, which happens to be that she found certain aspects of motherhood painful.
Critics questioned why she had children if she thinks it’s so appalling, which is a ridiculous thing to say on so many levels. Firstly, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for until you get there and secondly, you can deeply love your child and be a good parent while acknowledging that some aspects of parenting are difficult. In fact, that’s probably a healthy attitude.
In my opinion, Cusk is brave and honest and makes new parents feel like they are not alone when they are struggling. For the chapter on colic alone the woman deserves an OBE for services to parentkind.
Rachel Cusk’s story lived up to its cover promise of being ‘as compulsive as a thriller’. At the time, I had no idea that this book was seen as controversial and I still don’t understand why. Here is a woman telling her truth, which happens to be that she found certain aspects of motherhood painful.
Critics questioned why she had children if she thinks it’s so appalling, which is a ridiculous thing to say on so many levels. Firstly, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for until you get there and secondly, you can deeply love your child and be a good parent while acknowledging that some aspects of parenting are difficult. In fact, that’s probably a healthy attitude.
In my opinion, Cusk is brave and honest and makes new parents feel like they are not alone when they are struggling. For the chapter on colic alone the woman deserves an OBE for services to parentkind.
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