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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?
Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.
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Comments
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how does this woman sell books?
By: ch | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 22:19
What an excruciating interview! The interviewer did not challenge Cusk's many preposterous assertions, making it incredibly indulgent and even worse. The pessimism and self-centeredness are outrageous. I do not personally care for inexplicable rise of the "bad mommy" genre either, but who is she to talk?
Very silly...
By: notquitesane | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 18:21
I am a childless-by-choice woman, so I can't speak directly about the experiences of parenthood and whether or not that life is "uncreative," but I suspect whatever life you lead, you can make it as creative or uncreative as you like. Her attitude seems like a really silly and shallow way to look at parenthood.
It reminds me of something my grandmother liked to say. Whenever one of her grandkids whined that they were bored, she said, "Only people with no imagination get bored." From just reading this interview, Rachel Cusk sounds like she has very little imagination.
I for one won't be reading her books. The pretentiousness of many of her comments really put me off.
Must Ms. Cusk call a
By: adina | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 15:35
Must Ms. Cusk call a published author, and contributor to this web magazine, "Michael Chabon's wife"? Is this the our new feminist method of put-downs- to identify women by their husbands, but only when we're in a cat fight over imperceptible distinctions in the themes of our mothering memoirs?
Cusk's entire personae strikes me as a bit contrived. She doesn't even understand how people can watch such a violently rejectable medium as television, but slab on an extra hour and introduce a popcorn stand, and voilà, she is now, much more impressively, "seeing films."
Wait -- what?
By: Katy Read | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 14:57
"In truth, people are just processing their death wish, but they don’t know how to do it, so they write about it dishonestly."
I would have liked to see her elaborate on this. Anybody know what she was getting at?
Mommy Memoirs
By: akwoman | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 14:12
This whole interview seems very affected, unauthentic not to mention Ms. Cusk's self-important attitude regarding others' "mommy memoirs." She specifically mentions Ayelet Waldman's (not just "Michael Chabon's wife")as toxic and dishonest. I heartily disagree. Even though many things Ms. Waldman said do not reflect my own worldview, I find her writing and interviews very very honest, painfully (or maybe poignantly) so.
Her comment about her children's curious desire to watch tv-gasp!- followed by "I watch films," is risible. She seems to wish to be perceived as so detached from such vulgar practices as to "not understand" how her children could enjoy it. Instead I percieved her as some kind of exile from Planet Sundance sent to earth against her will to observe the strange customs of human children.
In summary she comes off as pretentious but more or less ordinary...a combination that doesn't work to interest me in a memoir.
A floating world
By: Bo | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 12:34
Why didn't someone ask her about raising her children as outsiders? As much of Italian life is centered around family life, and extended families at that, she's making sure her kids don't fully participate in that. They're not British, they're not Italian, they're just sort of floating.
She says that her generation were "second class citizens", but she didn't consult her kids about the big move.
Did she move her husband's daughter too?
Ok, I'll bite
By: palmcanoe | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 08:49
Raising children is not creative? Probably not for everyone always, but it's silly to be so absolutist. It seems odd to title the interview as though there was something about the addition of the children to the trip to Italy that had some bearing on how the author wrote, but her words indicate otherwise. She certainly could have just as well left the kids in England, in their uniforms, with a nanny or compliant relative so as not to be dragged down by the drudgery she feels compelled towards in their presence. I don't know if I can read the book now to find out if the author really is as priggish as this interview makes her sound.