In 1999, the British writer Rachel Cusk gave birth to the daughter as good as then, fifteen months later, to the second one. Like women writers all over the planet, she realized motherhood was material. So she wrote the book, "A Life's Work: On Becoming the Mother," which came out in Britain in 2001, when her younger daughter was the year old.
Adrian Clarke
Rachel Cusk
AFTERMATH
On Marriage as good as Separation
By Rachel Cusk
146 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $ 20.
The book was heavily promoted in England as "brutally honest," which meant many women unequivocally hated it. "On as good as upon it went, behind as good as forth," Cusk wrote after in the Guardian essay about the book's reception. "I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, many often, of being too intellectual."
But good read reviewers additionally found many to adore in her pages. "Compulsive as the thriller," one wrote. "A powerful, mostly droll account of pregnancy, birth as good as mothering which doesn't shimmer over the pain, poser as good as confusion though does applaud the wonder," another said. The book sold well.
So it stands to reason which upon getting divorced from her daughters' father, Cusk should write another memoir. "Aftermath: On Marriage as good as Separation" is the bookend to "A Life's Work." Good for her. If motherhood can be material, because not this?
Cusk is the writer of great reputation in Britain, the winner of the Whitbread First Novel endowment as good as the finalist for other prestigious prizes. Yet there is considerable disproportion betw! een her novella as good as nonfiction. Simply put, the novella is better. It has the stirring energy. Her descriptions have been more vivid, the plots have somewhere to go.
When essay about her own life, Cusk mostly sounds depressed, as good as appears not so many selfish as self-involved. Maybe it's an obvious indicate to have about the 45-year-old sequence memoirist, though she finds herself disproportionately fascinating.
"The day my husband moved his security out of the house," she writes, "I had toothache."
Her essay can be droll devious as good as dry as against to laugh-out-loud as good as when her observations strike their target, the bent clear in her novella shines through. But her intellectualism (she was prepared during Oxford) mostly comes opposite as pretension. And there's copiousness of which in "Aftermath." Pages of stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Oedipus as good as Antigone clog up her stream of consciousness.
Most distinguished about the inequality between her novella as good as nonfiction is which her made-up characters appear far more genuine than her genuine ones. Perhaps this is because of constraints imposed by Britain's strict defame as good as advance of remoteness laws. (An early British imitation run of Cusk's second memoir, "The Last Supper," about the family tarry in Italy, had to be pulped after some people who didn't conclude how they were decorated in the book sued.)
Notably absent from "A Life's Work" was the impression of the children's father. There was hardly any "we" in which book. Whatever the reason, her husband's previous good read deficiency creates Cusk's divorce the convincing sequel.
In "Aftermath," Cusk goes easy upon the sum of the actual separation. "My husband believed which I had treated him monstrously," she confides. But she doesn't contend why. "This belief of his couldn't be shaken: his total universe depended upon it. It was his story, as good as newly I have come to hatred stories."
The lack of d! etail is the book's many glaring omission. How can you write the discourse about divorce without observant what caused it? Without owning up to or trying to come to conditions with one's purpose in it? "Monstrously" is the absolute word. Cusk may hatred stories, though fundamentally her readers will wish to know: What's the story?
Emma Gilbey Keller is the writer to the American edition of The Guardian. Her latest book is The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family as good as Back Again.
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