Rachel Cusk’s memoir of moving to Italy.

British novelist Rachel Cusk has just published The Last Supper, 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, 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. 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?

Tags: a life’s work, rachel cusk, the last supper

Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.

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