Rachel Cusk's new memoir describes with brutal honesty the breakdown of her marriage. Why has she laid bare her family trauma, has she invaded her children's privacy and does she regret it?
Few figures in contemporary British literature divide people like Rachel Cusk. The writer, whose new memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation is published next month, attracts both admiration and ire: for her boldness as an artist, her self-belief, her pitiless gaze at herself and others. Her earlier book, A Life's Work, a devastating confessional about her experience of motherhood, "the long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth, the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed", attracted fury from some women critics: why bother having children, they said, if you're just going to write about how grim it all is. And Aftermath looks set to provoke more anger: it is a fierce, at times brutal examination of how Cusk left her husband of 10 years, and how she then tried to rebuild her life and the lives of her two children – considering stay-at-home mothers who describe themselves as "lucky", a disturbed lodger and a new lover along the way. She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a manner that is in no way comforting. Women writers do not tend to do this and get away with it.
Her writing is economical and precise – she describes someone as "a woman whose sorrows take extrovert and hedonistic forms" – which won't surprise readers of her under-rated novels. And her eye for detail, which she casts over incidents, interactions, relationships, is both merciless and subtle: from her suggestion that women in conventional families "can't see anything at all", to her admission that in wounding her children "I learned to truly love them", to her pitch-perfect evocation of the post-separation home: "Our daughters and I do not leave home very often: a kind of numbness has settled on our household that any moment can transform into pain." She writes, "they're my children. They belong to me": the sort of primal statement which one rarely reads these days, when men and women are so often seen as equal and identical "parents" rather than mothers and fathers.
Cusk makes you think differently and look differently, even if you don't agree with what she's saying. Here, she answers questions about Aftermath.
Why did you decide to write about your relationship breakdown?
I was asked by Granta magazine in 2010 to contribute an essay about feminism, which they said they wanted to be quite personal; and having thought at first that that wasn't the proper way to discuss feminism, I realised very quickly that for me now, perhaps it was the only way. The radicalism I had felt as a young woman began to seem to me if not exactly semantic then verbal, theoretical. As I have grown older, it is experience that has become radical. It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge. Sex, marriage, motherhood, work, domesticity: it is through living these things that the politics of being a woman are expressed, and I labour this point because it is important to understand that the individual nature of experience is essentially at odds – or should reserve the right to be – with any public discourse. I no longer presume to know how other women live or think or feel. I can only try to align myself with them, to get into sympathy with them, by saying how it is for me. And it is of course intrinsic to femininity that it is costive or denying to a degree, so the saying can become radical in itself, but only from a point of view of personal honesty. So the decision to write comes from that. And as for the subject, it had fallen within the compass of my experience and what I saw was that in the breakdown of marriage the whole broken mechanism of feminism was revealed. I had expected to find, at the end of the family structure, at least some proof of feminist possibility, however harsh. But either it wasn't there or I couldn't find it, and that seemed to me to be a subject worth writing about. The book grew from that essay, which forms the first chapter of it.
Your honesty, precision and intense gaze are unflinching and can be ruthless and unforgiving. You write: "Unclothed, truth can be vulnerable, ungainly, shocking. Over-dressed it becomes a lie." Is it exhausting? Is it worth it?
It's worth it if others find it helpful or meaningful. Yes, there is an element of exhaustion, of self-sacrifice, in this kind of writing, because without the most stringent honesty it is absolutely meaningless.
Have you ever regretted things you have written?
I've regretted the way they were presented. The line between literary memoir and degrading gossip can seem very fine where newspapers – your own not excepted – are concerned. And prose is such a vulnerable medium: the Guardian's "extract" from Aftermath consisted in fact of lines taken from all over the book and compressed into something I could barely recognise as my own writing. I did feel lacerated by people who read my motherhood book and concluded that I hated my children. Or perhaps the point was that they hadn't read it. But many, many small reparations have been set over the years against those big initial knocks and eventually outweighed them. Recently the NCT bookshop contacted me to say that they wanted to stock A Life's Work and I did feel that was a handshake from the heartland, as it were.
Do you ever hold back with what you write?
Yes, of course. Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back. The memoir is a confessional form, but that doesn't mean it is in itself a confession. It isn't a spewing out of emotion. In memoir you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.
Writing about yourself is exposing – were you worried what readers, friends and family would think of you?
There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform.
A Life's Work dealt with your experience of motherhood – was it more difficult to write about a relationship which involved two people, and a family of four people?
Yes, the experience of motherhood was very integrated and perhaps easier to write about, partly because the baby is a reflective template rather than a moving target. A developed family structure is obviously much more complex and also much more a product of society and history. It has more hinterland, and is harder to conscript and encompass in a single view. With this book I had to find patterns and parallels from much further back, from the roots of drama and Christianity and early modes of civilisation, in order to represent my sense that marriage is to an extent an illusion of personal choice. In breaking marriage you break more than your own personal narrative. You break a whole form of life that is profound and extensive in its genesis; you break the interface between self and society, self and history, self and fate as determined by these larger forces.
Have you invaded your children's privacy?
Children have to share their parents' destiny to some extent, like it or not. I happen to be a writer; they are the children of a writer. But I also strive to be quite impersonal in the way I write about figures in my life. "My mother" or "my children" are intended to be every reader's mother, every reader's children or concept of children. And in fact very often I've been criticised for not providing enough identifiable detail about these "actual" characters, for not naming them or physically describing them. That criticism, I've always sensed, has come from the very people who might at the same time accuse me of "using" or invading the privacy of those close to me. So I'm a little suspicious of it, while at the same time recognising an obligation to be clear with my daughters about what it is that I do.
Your "writer's objectivity" is important to you. What happens to it when you document something as subjective as the end of a relationship?
I suppose the proof of that will be in the reading, in whether I've managed to represent my personal experience in a way that illuminates something personal for the reader. That is really the essence of the transaction, and my handling of it was tested absolutely in this book. Yet there is something grimly and utterly objective in the breakdown of marriage, many things in fact. In a sense you are returned to the public realm; your private world is broken open and exposed and you come out – metaphorically speaking – on the streets. I wrote a lot of the book from this broken or "outside" perspective, and much of the metaphoric stream in the narrative concerns itself with this new mode of looking, which I liken to looking through the lit windows of other people's houses from the darkness outside.
Why do you think some women were so furious with A Life's Work?
Well I'm tempted to think, because it was true! Why would anyone bother being cross otherwise?
Will anyone be furious with Aftermath?
In motherhood an image is being defended, an image of rightness and completeness and happiness. Many women struggle to maintain that image, and it angers them to have it questioned. I don't think anyone could claim a positive image for divorce, so I don't expect there'll be the same defensiveness. Motherhood has traumatic elements, but divorce is only darkness, only trauma, so there aren't many controversial things that can be said about it. The question is whether it can be represented, whether my trauma can be made to stand for other people's.
Throughout your divorce your husband would say: "Call yourself a feminist." Do you?
I do, partly because it seems ungrateful and impolite not to, and partly because there's nothing else, really, to call oneself while retaining any connection to an original sense of justice.
What do you mean by what you call "the feminist principle of autobiographical writing"?
I mean that there is, for me, a defensible principle of autobiography where female experience is concerned; defensible in the sense that I personally would defend my decision to write about my own life, against the accusation that it is merely so much self-obsession or is the product of a self-obsessed culture. If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it. And given that this disjuncture is usually deeply personal, and relates to a personalised problem with a generalised image, autobiography becomes the best possible form for this articulation to take.
Do children belong to their mothers? You write: "They're my children. They belong to me."
Children belong to themselves, of course. But what I wanted to describe in the book were a number of primitive and fairly ferocious feelings that seemed to emerge from the rupture of separation and that directly contradicted my own meditated feminist politics. This was the beginning of my seeing the difference between feminism as an ideology and feminism as lived experience.
Is it a curse to be a mother?
Motherhood is a great test. It involves enormous submission, and to submit without being extinguished is what is testing. And it is a business of gifts and revelations as well as losses and bewilderments, of great visibility and significance alongside feelings of utter invisibility. So it has a core of contradiction that strikes me as fundamental to life. Perhaps it's a curse to live so close to this core, and perhaps it's merely an intensification of a more general conflict between duty and consciousness, between society and self.
Is it a curse to be a woman?
If it is then it's an interesting one, and it gets all the good lines. It's perhaps true that the less you live as a woman, the more cursed it is to be one.
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, by Rachel Cusk, is published on 1 March by Faber and Faber.
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