Rachel Cusk: "Women have complex and violent feelings towards men after being mothers"

• Rachel Cusk, interviewee "Do women want power or to be dominated?"

• On love "Marriage still has something of a fairy tale"

A lifetime's work

(Asteroid Books) is easy to explain and hard to read: it is a chronicle of boredom, estrangement, physical pain and loneliness of being a mother.

A metaphor dominates the text: the new mother, from the moment of childbirth, is expelled from her old life and

.

And in the middle, a creature.

In the foreword to A Lifetime Job he expressly says that this is a good book, well written, not just a sincere or strong book.

What does well written mean here? A.

I remember that I didn't like all those books that they sent you when you had children, all those manuals so imperative.

I wanted to write a real, intellectually complex book.

But there was something I didn't understand then: art and everything that sounded intellectual was seen by many people as the enemy of parenthood.

I think that was why so many people were upset with the book. She was a mother in the carefree years of Tony Blair and

.

Could this story be another kind of book?

A 90's style comedy novel, a little badass? It's a funny book, isn't it?

But it could not have been a fiction because motherhood is the most real experience there is.

It is the opposite of a fiction.

Reality was so overwhelming, so confusing... He was incapable of reading a novel, let alone thinking about it.

There are two missing figures in the book.

The first is the maternal grandmother.

I know women who reconcile with their mothers during their motherhood and others who become very harsh with them. My mother took three weeks to come to see her granddaughter and she never helped me with her.

Rather she criticized me in everything.

All women have a critical dialogue with their mothers when they have a child. For me, that dialogue made me understand the deep love I felt for my daughters and the pain I was carrying.

Thousands of times I saw myself before my daughters in situations that reminded me of my childhood.

And I realized that my instinct was to do the opposite of my mother... But I wanted my story to be as universal as possible, not just talk about my specific experience, so I didn't deal with that conflict.

The other absentee is man.

No man is relevant in this book.

Happiness and unhappiness are not conditioned by the couple. There are many books on motherhood in which the husband appears as a frustrated and comical character or as a wonderful gentleman who does the shopping and cooks dinner.

But I think the reality is not that.

I think that women have very complex and violent feelings towards men at that point in life. I thought that the experience of being a father was going to be basically the same as that of being a mother.

Then I sadly understood that no, there are things that separate us.

That's interesting.

Let's say there are two experiences from which you are excluded.

One is the physical fact of gestating, giving birth and taking care of the child with your body, including pain.

Pain is a taboo that women have repressed, that we don't talk about.

And then there is the cultural part, everything that has to do with expectations.

And in that area I do believe that it is possible to move forward, that it is possible to share experiences, because I believe that men and women are basically the same thing. There are two literary themes that are very typical of our time: the story of the death of the father and that of The paternity.

And in part I see them as parallel themes. I read

One is the physical fact of gestating, giving birth and taking care of the child with your body, including pain.

Pain is a taboo that women have repressed, that we don't talk about.

And then there is the cultural part, everything that has to do with expectations.

And in that area I do believe that it is possible to move forward, that it is possible to share experiences, because I believe that men and women are basically the same thing. There are two literary themes that are very typical of our time: the story of the death of the father and that of The paternity.

And in part I see them as parallel themes. I read

One is the physical fact of gestating, giving birth and taking care of the child with your body, including pain.

Pain is a taboo that women have repressed, that we don't talk about.

And then there is the cultural part, everything that has to do with expectations.

And in that area I do believe that it is possible to move forward, that it is possible to share experiences, because I believe that men and women are basically the same thing. There are two literary themes that are very typical of our time: the story of the death of the father and that of The paternity.

And in part I see them as parallel themes. I read

that it is possible to share experiences, because I believe that men and women are basically the same thing. There are two very typical literary themes of our time: the story of the death of the father and that of paternity.

And in part I see them as parallel themes. I read

that it is possible to share experiences, because I believe that men and women are basically the same thing. There are two very typical literary themes of our time: the story of the death of the father and that of paternity.

And in part I see them as parallel themes. I read

by Manuel Vilas, which is a wonderful book and is a good example.

My downside is that, deep down, this narrative of hurt characters who confront their father, who is a pathetic character... This scheme that is very common for male narrators leads them to continue seeing themselves as hurt sons and, deep down, There is something elusive about it, more comforting than thinking of yourself as a father. Karl Ove Knausgård also wrote about a dying father. Yes, and he also writes just as harshly about the experience of having children.

He is lucky because he has been allowed.

And he has been allowed because he is a man.

But he is fine, he has taken advantage of it, his books are valuable. Knausgård said that he wished he had written with less urgency, with more patience and care.

He's right, there are moments when you feel like saying "Hey, take your time."

But I myself wrote this book in terrible conditions too, with two babies, without sleep... I wrote without being able to stop and think about narrative strategies. And so I have continued.

Well, lately I try to change.

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