“I think of the women I know who have had children. In A Life’s Work, Cusk writes of experiencing a similar sensation: And I’ve seen others do the same and recoiled in response. I’ve tentatively dipped a toe into the ‘are we really going to talk about how tough that was?’ pool. In the past few months, I’ve been on both sides of this strange dance. Then we cluck sympathetically, murmur supportive words, praise their children’s cute faces, and move on. We hint at them darkly, alluding to something scarring and sinister. But we don’t talk about these things, not really. Many of the women I know have their own stories of the price that motherhood exacted from them. Becoming a parent put me through things that I can’t quite put into words. And so the biggest surprise about Cusk’s take on the trials of motherhood is that it was so controversial upon its publication.Īnd yet, I get it. “Being a mother is the best thing you’ll ever do – and the hardest” is repeated with such frequency on the Mom’s groups I’m a member of on Facebook that I now detest the adage. We live in an era where divulging dark secrets is de rigueur and being driven to drink by your kids is practically a content vertical on websites such as Scary Mommy. This surge in confessional books about child-bearing is part of a larger cultural trend. There are memoirs of sudden pregnancy (“ And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready,” by Meaghan O’Connell) and struggling to conceive (“ An Excellent Choice: Panic and Joy on My Solo Path to Motherhood,” by Emma Brockes) accounts of postpartum depression (“ Things That Helped,” by Jessica Friedmann) and postpartum euphoria (“ The Motherhood Affidavits,” by Laura Jean Baker) novels about whether to have children (“ Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti), novels about mothering someone else’s children (“ That Kind of Mother,” by Rumaan Alam), even novels about killing children (“ The Perfect Nanny,” by Leila Slimani, and “ The Perfect Mother,” by Aimee Molloy - part of a genre grouped under the ghastly moniker “mom thrillers”). Last year, the newspaper’s literary critic Parul Sehgal – herself a new mother – remarked in awe upon the massive surge of motherhood books published in Cusk’s wake: As Cusk’s fame and renown has grown, so too has the genre she transformed. More than 15 years later, the Times couldn’t have been more wrong. In 2002, when Rachel Cusk published A Life’s Work, the New York Times pronounced her motherhood memoir funny and smart.
0 kommentar(er)
