Eat, Pray, Love … But with Babies.

British novelist Rachel Cusk has just published The Last Supper [2], a memoir about skipping out of another dreary British winter and setting off to Italy with her husband and children, in search of art and adventure. Cusk became a cult heroine/villain, depending on one’s maternal temperament, in 2001 when she published A Life’s Work [3], about the first year of raising her child. “The description of new motherhood was so grueling, so lonesome, so pessimistic that I couldn't bear to read more than a chapter or two,” a friend of mine wrote me, echoing many reviewers. I, on the other hand, found comfort in Cusk. In an interview with Double X, she discusses her two memoirs and her novels.

You write about uprooting your family and leaving for Italy in an offhand way: “perhaps we would return to England, perhaps we would not.” Was it really as casual as that?

Rachel Cusk: That was slightly disingenuous. What I meant was that I wanted to be open to possibility in life, to veering off on some unknown course, which is what I most miss about being a single person pre-children: this idea that you can just go off and change your plans at will.

Who is the “we?” Did you consult the children and husband, or was it all you?

Rachel Cusk: “We” is the family organism with me as the steering committee, or the brain. People think that children are very scheduled and routine-obsessed but it’s not true. In fact, they are very un-historied people. They don’t really have a sense of how life ought to be. I’ve had moments of realizing this, and then I’ve thought, “We could have lived in a caravan, or gone around on a horse, and in fact they would have really enjoyed that.” This state of being routine-bound stems from the work of them, but not from them. Routine and schedule is what divides people in families. Adventure is what unites them.

Did you worry your children would miss their friends?

For me to be happy is in the end more important to my children psychologically and spiritually. I realize their friendships are like little seedlings—you uproot them and they usually die. But they can make them again.

The same thing happened to me when we moved from America back to England when I was a girl. It was horrible. I was suffering a lot because of the loss of my best friend. And I don’t know what it means that I decided to do the same thing to my daughter. I guess that I’ve been there before.

Is that what you mean when you have a pang of guilt about uprooting your daughters, and then you conclude “our destinies are better off intertwined?”

What I hate and what I’ve always hated is separation, and I think that comes from my own childhood. When I was a child, authority and adults were one and the same. They were the “parents,” and we were the “children,” and there was not much intimacy or closeness. When I say “intertwined,” I mean I don’t agree with the version of family life where parents are the authorities who make decisions on behalf of children. You have to make a decision for yourself, and be honest about it, and they can like it or not like it.

The children are not really all that present in the book; they’re more like minor characters.

The book was originally planned to be all about the children. I was thinking for a while it would be an update to A Life’s Work [3]. But then I realized that what I wanted to say was the antithesis of that in every way. It became about the art, and viewing art as the opposite of being a mother.

What do you mean by that?

Art is completed—everything is present in it, and the process of looking and understanding is a backwards process, a retrospective process. It’s a release of tension—not of responsibility exactly but of having to live. I’ve found in family life the impossibility of completion. In parenthood, nothing is ever finished. The instant you get it all in your grasp it slips away

This is particularly true in this anxious form of parenting we do now. You’re always conferring meaning on the littlest things, creating a story of life. And yet it’s very, very difficult to know whether you’re succeeding or failing. It’s very unlike creativity, or writing. Being a parent is not a particularly creative thing to do.

So with writing, you always know you’re succeeding?

It’s a process, and the process is sacred. You’re given a form and a place in which restitution can occur. It’s a transforming state. Sometimes you can’t get into that state and you do it wrong. But it’s there. It’s like playing a musical instrument. It’s a redeeming experience that doesn’t happen anywhere else in life.

Let’s get back to parenting being uncreative. Some have described your view of mothering in A Life’s Work as dreary.

Parenting is not dreary. It’s just uncreative.

You don’t find making paper mâché masks creative?

Definitely not.

What were you looking for in Italy?

Italy is the place you go to be restored when you are in a devitalized state. You can be restored to the romance of life and get away from the great grisly world we lived in, of children going and coming from school in their uniforms. I can never get over the sight of the children returning to the house in their uniforms, even though I wore one myself. I always find it surprising.

Why do you think you looked for solace in Italian paintings rather than say, going to New York and seeing modern art?

When I left school and went to university, my artistic interests were completely contemporary. I was situating myself in the “now” as a new person. My attraction was to everything modern.

But I think maybe what draws me now is the strange and obsessive representation of the beginnings of Christianity. The Madonnas and infants are very fundamental human themes, and as a mother those things spoke to me in a completely new way. Not because I’m thinking about women with babies but because there is something about the very beginning of human life which I am much more alive to.

It’s really a process of wonder, at the amazing capacity of art to be there for you—to be your friend. You just turn up at the place and it consoles you. When I was younger, I felt like I was alone and my experience was totally different than anyone else’s. I looked at my parents and I couldn’t understand how I was their child. But—and this discovery was so powerful—a book was proof that there was another reality, that your family is not the only reality. You can find reflections of yourself elsewhere.

Your daughters are now 10 and 8? So they are almost pre-teens?

Oh my God. I don’t think of them as pre-teens!

Do you think they will ever feel that way, that they will need to find refuge somewhere other than the family?

Their relationship with their parents is very different than mine was. We were a Catholic family, so my parents allied themselves with a further authority, which is God. The children were second-class citizens. But that’s not how it’s done now. These are good times to be a parent, because children are now worthy of rights.

Still, the rejection of my values might come, and it might be a violent rejection. There will be a moment when they realize that they are themselves, and I am me. Already there are some things, like I can’t understand how they can watch television.

You don’t watch any television?

No, I see films.

Do you know who Susan Boyle is?

I can’t believe you know about her. Until this morning I thought she was a conservative politician.

Since you wrote A Life’s Work, there have been a slew of mommy memoirs, the latest batch about the phenomenon of the “bad mother.” [4] What do you think of them?

There’s definitely this strand of “I’m going to be really honest and say I don’t love my children” or “I’m incompetent,” ha ha ha. It’s an old form that repeats itself. I’m sure it’s dishonest in one way or another, although I can’t put my finger on why. People write—“I drank like a fish when I was breastfeeding” or “I didn’t sterilize the bottle,” and of course you know they did nothing of the sort.

There are people who are genuinely in crisis, who are alcoholics, say, and can’t cope with a small baby, or who are truly psychologically vulnerable and are a genuine threat to themselves or the baby. But that’s not who is writing the “bad mother” memoirs. When I wrote A Life’s Work I didn’t just set out to say every single thing or reveal my failures or flaws. I made very strict decisions about the kinds of things I would say so that they had a larger purpose, and got to something bigger, more universal. It doesn’t console anybody to know that Michael Chabon’s wife loves him more than her children [5]. This kind of memoir writing is a toxic, and dishonest form of writing

Why do you think these memoirs have proliferated?

I don’t know what to make of it. I remember a good writer, a literary person, wrote one of these and it made me so angry. It was so dishonest, and it’s exactly this lack of honesty that makes the culture of motherhood so treacherous to navigate. This self-obsession is the worst thing that can happen when we create families. All these people extend themselves into the suburbs, and they obsess about themselves through these other people. It’s just being echoed in a literary form. In truth, people are just processing their death wish, but they don’t know how to do it, so they write about it dishonestly.

Speaking of the suburbs, one line in your novel, Arlington Park [6], has always stuck with me. One of the main characters, Juliet, says to herself: “My husband Benedict murdered me. He was very gentle about it; it didn’t really hurt at all. In fact I hardly knew it was happening.” Yet they do not have a particularly toxic marriage in the context of the book. Is this just the state of the modern wife, even the wife with a decent husband?

People misunderstood Arlington Park. I wasn’t trying to write about life in a typical suburb. It didn’t have to be about motherhood, it could have been set in a monastery or the army. It was about how people behave in communities once they’ve agreed to sacrifice justice and equality and other principles.

So does it say anything about the modern wife?

Something happens to men and women at a certain point in their lives. That’s not to say that I hate everybody in the suburbs, or that people are despicable and men are awful. Life isn’t like that. I’m saying that women make certain compromises and it’s a real problem, a moral and spiritual problem.

In France, Arlington Park was a bestseller. I think French women politicize their personal lives. They are not remotely interested in silencing complexity in this area; the more complex the better. In fact, in France, the poster for the book read, “Tous les hommes sont des assassins.” [“All men are killers.”]