A Life's Work
In 2002, when Rachel Cusk published A Life’s Work, the New York Times pronounced her motherhood memoir funny and smart. They also called it career suicide.
More than 15 years later, the Times couldn’t have been more wrong. As Cusk’s fame and renown has grown, so too has the genre she transformed. Last year, the newspaper’s literary critic Parul Sehgal – herself a new mother – remarked in awe upon the massive surge of motherhood books published in Cusk’s wake:
There are memoirs of sudden pregnancy (“And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready,” by Meaghan O’Connell) and struggling to conceive (“An Excellent Choice: Panic and Joy on My Solo Path to Motherhood,” by Emma Brockes); accounts of postpartum depression (“Things That Helped,” by Jessica Friedmann) and postpartum euphoria (“The Motherhood Affidavits,” by Laura Jean Baker); novels about whether to have children (“Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti), novels about mothering someone else’s children (“That Kind of Mother,” by Rumaan Alam), even novels about killing children (“The Perfect Nanny,” by Leila Slimani, and “The Perfect Mother,” by Aimee Molloy — part of a genre grouped under the ghastly moniker “mom thrillers”).
This surge in confessional books about child-bearing is part of a larger cultural trend. We live in an era where divulging dark secrets is de rigueur and being driven to drink by your kids is practically a content vertical on websites such as Scary Mommy. “Being a mother is the best thing you’ll ever do – and the hardest” is repeated with such frequency on the Mom’s groups I’m a member of on Facebook that I now detest the adage. And so the biggest surprise about Cusk’s take on the trials of motherhood is that it was so controversial upon its publication.
And yet, I get it. Becoming a parent put me through things that I can’t quite put into words. Many of the women I know have their own stories of the price that motherhood exacted from them. Breastfeeding failures. Post-partum depression. Fertility treatments. Excruciating deliveries. But we don’t talk about these things, not really. We hint at them darkly, alluding to something scarring and sinister. Then we cluck sympathetically, murmur supportive words, praise their children’s cute faces, and move on. In the past few months, I’ve been on both sides of this strange dance. I’ve tentatively dipped a toe into the ‘are we really going to talk about how tough that was?’ pool. And I’ve seen others do the same and recoiled in response. In A Life’s Work, Cusk writes of experiencing a similar sensation:
“I think of the women I know who have had children. Most appear unable to speak about giving birth at all, except one, who told me that at one point she begged the midwife to shoot her.”
If the truth is this terrible, maybe we don’t care to know, or touch, each other’s difficulties? Maybe challenges are contagious?
But while fear of contagion may prevent us from being honest with each other, it hasn’t deadened my curiosity about how motherhood feels to other mothers. And that’s why I loved A Life’s Work so much. In her unsparing account on the conception, birth, and first year of her daughter Albertine’s life, Cusk took me closer to the heart of another woman’s experience than I’ve ever been, and – if my experiences to date are predictive of the future – than I may ever go. Below are some of the excerpts I found most stirring, smart, and sobering.
On the materialism of love:
“The fantasy of a child’s frilly bassinets, its tiny, snow-white garments, its angelic cribs and insignia of stars and teddy bears. Like a teenager in her postered room dreaming of pop stars, a new mother’s love exists in the mind and in the regalia of her material devotion.”
On the joys and pressures of nap-time:
“Her eyelids begin to droop. The sight of them reminds me of the possibility that she might go to sleep and stay that way for two or three hours. She has done this before. The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. Sometimes these pleasures elude me and I end up gloomily cleaning the house, or standing in front of the mirror striving to recognize myself. Sometimes I miss the baby and lie beside her crib while she sleeps. Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute.”
On the cost of being apart from your child:
“It is not love that troubles me when I leave the baby, like a rope and harness paid out behind me wherever I go. It is rather that when I leave her the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure. My presence appears almost overnight to have accrued a material value, as if I had been fitted with a taxi meter, to which the price of experience is inseparably indexed. When I am out I am distracted by its ticking.”
On being at the mercy of your enfant roi:
“The baby is moved from her carriage to a chair like a tetchy monarch while we, her court, strive to entertain her. Her night wakings become more frequent. By day I feel a burden of social anxiety in the baby’s presence, like a hostess. We await her reviews of the theatre the world has become for her.”
On how unpredictable babies can be:
“The litany of the baby’s requirements continues regardless of hour, season, or location, and because her proclivities are not those of the adult world, when we are at large routine acquires the distinctive flavor of anarchy. She shrieks uncontrollably in quiet places, grows hungry where it is impossible for me to feed her, excretes where it is pristine: it is as if I myself have been returned to some primitive, shameful condition, being sick in expensive shops, crying on buses, while other people remain aloof and unpitying. My daughter emanates unprocessed human need where the world is at its most civilized; and while at first I am on the side of that world, which I have so recently left, and struggle to contain and suppress her, soon, like so many mothers, I come to see something inhuman in civilization.”
On the contrast between life at work and life at home:
“After a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation to each other. A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office. Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world.”
Sometimes, I found Cusk’s musings intensely relatable, as when she described unscheduled week upon unscheduled week during her maternity leave as “empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.” There’s comfort in that, in knowing that the vast sameness was unsettling to someone else too. On other occasions, such as when she describes motherhood as “a career in conformity,” her experience diverges from mine. Much like marriage, when I eschewed showers, bridal parties, cake-cutting ceremonies and wedding registries in favor of something more intimate and personal, having a child has given me a vehicle for asserting my individuality. I’ve seen the gender reveal cakes, the requisite “pose your baby with a block or blanket stating its age in months” photos, the onesies with silly slogans (“I’ll have a bottle of the house white”), and I’ve happily rejected them all. There’s comfort in that too.
Upon beginning A Life’s Work, it quickly becomes clear – this is no mere parenting primer. This is the intellectual interrogation of a stage of life that so many of us accept at face value. Cusk made me think of motherhood conceptually. And she did it so well that it’s challenged my conviction that I have my own motherhood story to write. Is there anything left to say that Cusk hasn’t said already? Are there any descriptions deft enough to sit next to her devastatingly skilled prose?
Ultimately, I don’t know. But maybe writing is like caring for a child – once you’re committed, you can’t help but continue. How’s that for a cheesy onesie slogan?