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Rachel Cusk, a writer against the culture of happy motherhood

2023-01-23T05:08:10.459Z


'Un trabajo para toda la vida', the controversial autobiographical essay on parenting with which the British author became known in 2001, is published for the first time in Spanish. After denying it for years, today she considers it "the most relevant that I have written"


The appointment is in a duplex with views over the tin roofs of the Marais, the exclusive Parisian neighborhood that Rachel Cusk chose as her home after moving to Paris almost two years ago.

In part, as a one-man protest against Brexit, but also as the last vital adventure before the arrival of old age.

The 55-year-old British writer opens the door barefoot as she packs her suitcase for Madrid, where this week she will present her new book,

A Job for Life

(Asteroid Books), which is actually an old book.

When he was young, Cusk lived for a year in a student flat in the Barrio de las Letras, teaching English while learning Spanish and working on his first writings, social satires on the female condition that garnered good reviews, although today perhaps somewhat theoretical, works by an author in her twenties who still had a lot to live for.

“They were books fed by the brain and not by life.

If she hadn't been a mother and hadn't written this book, I don't know what would have happened to my job.

I suspect that I would have ended up running out of that brain energy, as happens to so many writers who deny their own experience of reality, ”he says.

More information

Rachel Cusk: “Only a leader with a radical identity will get us out of this.

Another white lawyer dressed in a suit will not be able to”

Cusk wrote

A Job for Life,

which is published in Spanish two decades after it appeared in English, during the pregnancy and the first months of life of her second daughter, Jessy, and when the eldest, Albertine, was just over a year old.

When it was published in 2001, it caused a minor literary scandal in the UK.

“A lot of people found it offensive,” he recalls.

It was interpreted as a dissident manual on child care, a misunderstanding caused by an absurd cover illustrated with women's heels and a baby's leggings, when it was rather the stark chronicle of pregnancy, childbirth and upbringing signed by an inexperienced mother. and sleepy, terrified of the transformation of her body and nostalgic for her “pre-maternal being”.

The criticism was devastating: they accused her of opposing "the propagation of the human species" and asked that custody of her daughters be taken away

Her book opposed the dominant culture of motherhood, in which Cusk saw "a lie, a space populated by evangelists, moralists and obsessive controllers" who did not hesitate to make all kinds of "threats and promises of retaliation" against those who dared to question it.

It was interpreted as a treaty signed by a misanthrope who hated being a mother, even though its pages also contained affection, empathy and love.

But hers was a piece of counter-propaganda, so perhaps it was absurd to expect kind words from her, as it would be to require the author of an anti-totalitarian manifesto to deign, in the name of fairness, to praise the construction of highways and swamps. by a dictatorial regime.

“There is always a book that touches closely on something you have denied about yourself or your experience.

And, reading it,

it is inevitable that you hate that book and that you hate its author”, he relativizes now.

That could explain why the most furious critics were signed by women.

One accused her of opposing "the propagation of the human species."

Another came to ask that custody of her daughters be taken away.

They accused her of suffering from postpartum depression, of being irresponsible, an egomaniac, and a pretentious pretentious intellectual.

"One reviewer wrote that she didn't understand how she could sign off on such long, fancy sentences when she, in my situation, could barely read the powdered milk label from sheer exhaustion."

Another came to ask that custody of her daughters be taken away.

She was accused of suffering from postpartum depression, of being irresponsible, an egomaniac, and a pretentious person who pretended to be an intellectual.

"One reviewer wrote that she didn't understand how she could sign off on such long, fancy sentences when she, in my situation, could barely read the powdered milk label from sheer exhaustion."

Another came to ask that custody of her daughters be taken away.

She was accused of suffering from postpartum depression, of being irresponsible, an egomaniac, and a pretentious person who pretended to be an intellectual.

"One reviewer wrote that she didn't understand how she could sign off on such long, fancy sentences when she, in my situation, could barely read the powdered milk label from sheer exhaustion."

Karl Ove Knausgård, another autobiographical phenomenon of recent years, at an event with Rachel Cusk in Dublin in 2012. Liza Cauldwell

That sidereal misunderstanding made Cusk renege on his book.

“For a long time, I regretted having written it, I deeply regretted recounting my birth and motherhood.

It seemed very sad to me that my daughters ended up believing that I did not love them, ”he admits.

He had expected some scorn, dealing with a subject with little literary status, but not this storm of hate.

Cusk says he didn't even make any money from it.

“Despite the scandal, nobody bought it.

I told myself that she must be the only author in the world for whom the controversy did not generate income, ”he smiles.

They invited her to all the morning shows to defend themselves against her.

She refused.

She preferred to put her book aside, like a child she had given up for adoption, like an old instrument gathering dust in an attic.

Until, a few years later, when she read it again,

it seemed to him that his notes still seemed sincere.

Or, at least, preferable to a sepulchral silence.

"It may be the most relevant thing I've ever written, which means I don't have to pay attention to anything, neither praise nor censure," he says.

Despite denunciations of his alleged self-centeredness, he says that writing the book was an act of self-sacrifice.

"She was a woman alone on an island sending smoke signals to other mothers incommunicado who believed they were the problem."

Rehabilitation was not long in coming.

Years later, the British Association of Midwives included it in a list of recommended reading for pregnant women.

“Time has done what it usually does: appease everything.

It was a closed topic.

And, without giving myself too much importance, I suppose that my book contributed to reopening it.

Now it is no longer a taboo to say that a woman has a bad time having a child”.

Despite the scandal, no one bought my book.

I told myself that she must be the only author in the world for whom the controversy did not generate income ”

A Lifetime Job

was also a detour into a new literary form, the autobiographical essay, which has brought a great deal of conflict to his life and work.

She would then publish

Spoils

, about her traumatic divorce, which drew equally devastating reviews (

The Times

called her "a brittle

dominatrix

and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband with delight"), and

The Last Supper

, about a family stay in three months in Tuscany, for which she was denounced for defamation by one of her characters.

Over time, Cusk ended up leaving that corrosive first person aside to delve into a more abstract writing in the trilogy that launched Against the Light

.

, a more experimental book, made of disconnected and anodyne conversations starring Faye, a kind of double of his with whom he exposed himself much less.

“I do not deny the most autobiographical part of my work, nor do I believe that it was artistically wrong.

Actually, I don't think the controversy was my fault.

But I'm not someone who looks for conflict and I understood that I had to hold back.

It cost me a lot, but I got it."

Cusk has no intention of returning to the line of fire, although he anticipates that his next book will be a mix of fiction and personal testimony.

It is a short volume, which he has already finished, in which he will recount an attack that he was the victim of eight months ago in Paris.

“An unbalanced person attacked me in the middle of the street, in daylight, for no apparent reason.

It caused me brain damage.

For months I was unable to write and I felt very sad ”, he details modestly.

Annie Ernaux, brand new Nobel laureate whom he has just interviewed for

The New York Times

, has served as inspiration.

Cusk admires that he writes “as if he burned all the bridges” without looking back.

The resemblances are evident, even though she has never seen her as a model.

“I think I tried to be liked much more than she did.

Through black humor, for example.

She was not being totally sincere, I did not dare to be so brutal ”.

If this is the Cusk she's trying to please, what's in store for the one she's out to kill?

Meanwhile, the author is not sure if her daughters, now in their twenties, have already read

A Lifetime Job

.

“I don't expect you to be interested in what I write,” she says modestly.

“But maybe they will read it the day they want to know where they came from.

This book will be my answer.

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Source: elparis

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