review: A Life's Work

Rachel Cusk is a Novelist with a capital N.

I can tell this because in her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) she intersperses moments of genuine insight with dreadfully overwritten prose. Here’s a sample:

I long for my child, long for her as a sort of double, a tiny pilot boat winging young and certain up the channel ahead of me, guiding the blind, clumsy weight of me through. (211)

In my humble opinion, the only thing blind and clumsy about this passage is its use of metaphor. But I’m being merely subjective on aesthetic grounds: others may find narrative like this moving; for me, the only thing moving is my stomach.

More interesting to me were Cusk’s confidences on the vexations and trials of new motherhood: the shock of becoming an unequal partner, the awkwardness of playgroups, and the decidedly un-natural feeling of ‘natural’ processes such as breastfeeding. Every so often, I thought she really crystallised a feeling or an experience that I shared. Like Cusk, I too chafe somewhat at the invisible bonds of motherhood, and sometimes wish for the freedom to just to do my own thing (even if that thing is nothing much at all). Like Cusk, I feel somewhat irritated by responses to this feeling along the lines of ‘yes, but look at what a wonderful baby you have!‘ (as if that was the problem: you can love your child, but still feel constrained by the constant responsibility of looking after them). Here is how Cusk summarises the problem:

Months after the birth I still found myself affronted and incredulous ... by the fact that I could no longer sleep in or watch a film or spend a Saturday morning reading ... The loss of these things seemed a high price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of a daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort. My loss and my gain were unrelated, were calculated without the aim of some final, ultimate balance. (144-45)

Of course, in the great scheme of things, losing sleep-ins is not really a huge loss (as compared to, say, the loss of a home, job or life), but it is true that motherhood means that your time is not really your own, unless the baby is asleep or with trusted carers. What I found perceptive about this passage was the idea of loss and gain being unrelated, that they don’t balance out. This formulation highlights that while much is gained that is valued and important - a child, a new experience, new insights and so on - much is also lost - a former self, a former way of life, independence, a career - that is also of value. And it should be okay to mourn that, and cherish its significance. Not to do so, in my view, risks trapping women in the myth of sentimentalised motherhood, and denigrating the experience of women who don’t become mothers.

Cusk gestures elsewhere to broader issues of sexual inequality and motherhood. She comments that ‘childbirth and motherhood are the anvil upon which sexual inequality was forged’ (8) and ‘the biological destiny of women remains standing amidst the ruins of their inequality’ (19) (sidenote: ‘ruins of their inequality’? really?) But these remain cursory gestures at best. Cusk’s persona in this memoir may be ill-at-ease with the narrative of motherhood pre-constructed for her, but her critique remains resolutely at the level of the individual. Rather than take Arminatta Forna’s approach - and that of poet Adrienne Rich, before her - of critiquing the myth and institution of motherhood, Cusk only detours from her anecdotal approach to reconsider literary works such as D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth from her new perspective.

Not that there’s anything wrong with taking an idiosyncratic approach: Anne Enright does that too in the fantastic Making Babies. Where Enright and Cusk differ, however, is that Enright does not attempt to offer ‘the truth’ of her individual experience (and she avoids the purple prose too). Enright holds the reader at a distance even as she delves into her most personal experiences. She also avoids the troubling habit that Cusk has of resorting to imperialist and xenophobic metaphors to explain her experiences: Cusk’s newborn baby is likened to ‘a colony’ (95), and her affront at her loss of independence is seen as the result of ‘some foreign and despicable justice’ (144). Similarly, Cusk’s sardonic tales of tried-and-found-wanting babysitters from Brazil, Spain and Slovenia (143-58), appear oblivious to the national, ethnic and class dimensions of the relationship, and appear to position the reader as sharing her privileged exasperation.

This reader didn’t.

Fortunately, a copy of Rich’s Of Woman Born (1972) has arrived for me at the local library. Perhaps that will offer both the personal and political account of motherhood that Cusk so conspicuously lacks.

review: Making Babies

I like books. My baby does too: Where Is Baby’s Belly-Button? and the collected works of Spot have long been favourites of hers. Such is her enjoyment of books that she even allowed me to read without interruption during her marathon 90-minute breastfeeding sessions. I’ve even managed to keep the reading up - though at a much reduced pace - as she has continued to grow, and become much less malleable to my will. This liking of books is not completely random - I do have a point and I’m getting to it.

There are many, many books around on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth, which I would’ve thought I would devour when my time came. Yet I felt strangely uninterested in reading them while I was pregnant. I dipped into things like What to Expect When You’re Expecting if I needed an answer to a specific question, or just wanted to check in as to what kind of fruit the baby had turned into that month. But I hardly read any of the many books on offer cover to cover.

From this distance, it reads kinda like denial, and maybe it was, in a way. But throughout most of my pregnancy, I had a strange sense of calm and an unusually upbeat frame of mind. On some level, I seemed to have intuited that reading a lot about all the many things that could go wrong during pregnancy and birth - and encylopaedic books like What to Expect ... usually cover everything, no matter how rare - would just be a massive downer. Of course, I didn’t give up reading all together: I decided that I would collect all of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries - my literary equivalent of comfort food - and read them all again for about the twentieth time. Mercifully, I managed to find out who murdered Roger Ackroyd before I went into labour.

This long preface about my pregnancy reading habits is by way of introducing novelist Anne Enright’s essay collection - is that what it is? - Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. This is one of the few books that I did read on the subject - and read from beginning to end - while I was pregnant. I think the reason that it proved an exception to the ‘everything you needed to know from ectopic pregnancy to pre-eclampsia’ type of book is that it was a) witty, b) personal and c) made no claims to be talking about every woman’s experience. I was beguiled from the first sentence of ‘Breeding’: ‘Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens - we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests (p 5).’ How could I not be won over by a first essay on the parallels between pregnancy and alien abductions?

Each piece is a little different. ‘Nine Months’, for example, mimics the What to Expect ... month-by-month narrative, and lyrically details the first nine months of her baby’s life. She tells us what her baby’s stage of development is that month, paralleled with her own ‘regression’. In the eighth month:

The baby is in flying form, lying on her back and just laughing and kicking for no reason. I don’t know what she is laughing at. Is this a memory? Is she imagining, for the first time, tickles, even though there are no tickles there?

She may be the only truly happy person on the planet. I look at her and hope she isn’t bonkers. (p 62)

‘Babies: A Breeder’s Guide’ contains several mini-topics: idiosyncratic thoughts on everything from God - ‘all religions ... prize and praise the figure of the mother ... which makes up, in a way for being skipped in shop queues and looking like a heap‘ - to Buggies - ‘pushing a buggy makes you look like you’re on the way to the methadone clinic’ - to Poo - ‘often, when a mother is whispering to her baby, she is whispering about shit’. (pp 111-35)

Looking at the comments on the back of the book, Enright has received praise for her ‘truth-telling’, giving the ‘true facts’ and being an ‘effective contraceptive’ (presumably because of that truth-telling). While these commentators may be picking up on the same intimate tone to which I responded, or the many pithy turns of phrase, these comments also seem to echo the obsession with ‘truth-telling’ that marks many other books about pregnancy and birth. I should also add to my growing list that I am currently reading feminist Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions at the moment, and she is another ‘truth-teller’. I’m wondering why we need so many truth-tellers when it seems like every new mother with a pen is telling it like it is.

But I digress. Back to the book at hand. While Enright’s recounting of the birth of her first child sounds horrific, and the maternity care she experienced somewhat appalling, it strangely didn’t act as a downer in the way that those other ‘truth-telling’ books seemed to threaten. Part of the reason is because it wasn’t patronising, in that she never implied that because something was a certain way for her, then it would be like that for anyone else. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was uplifting, but it felt considered, and, in a strange way, intimate. By that I mean, it felt almost a privilege to have someone share such a personal experience and give a ‘warts and all’ account of it. Like a friend who trusts you enough to tell you something that they’ve never told anybody else. Except, of course, she had told anyone who cared to read the book.

I say ‘account’ deliberately. These pieces may have been crafted in snatched moments while her baby was asleep, but they are most definitely ‘crafted’ narratives in the way that her short stories, in particular, are. Perhaps what sets this book apart, then, is that it pays tribute to the singularity of Enright’s embodied experience. The tender descriptions of her daughter’s development are not those that another mother could, would or should give. And, in my view, the book seems to be just as much about exploring how to write a new life - both hers and the baby’s - as well as how to live it. The mix of styles offers a patch-work approach that doesn’t attempt to represent the totality of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. In recognising the limits of representation, but also pushing those limits, Enright doesn’t so much ‘tell the truth’, as write herself into being in the subject position of new mother.