to think this is the most annoyingly pretentious article I have read in a long time?

[sphil]

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/17/rachel-cusk-divorce-the-aftermath

I felt as if I was drowning in a sea of verbiage by the time I'd finished it.

X, Y, Zzzzzzzzzz

Do you remember the episode of Friends where Joey writes a recommendation for Monica & Chandler using Thesaurus?

But it said on the cover of the Guardian that the article was 'long awaited'.

LineRunner - yeah right!

"Sometimes, in the bath, the children cry. Their nakedness, or the warm water, or the comfort of the old routine dislodges their sticking-plaster emotions and shows the wound beneath."

Oh dear.

I've not got much past the first paragraph.

To be fair, I've had one of her books for five years and I'm still on page 2.

Bringmesunshine, I think that was what RC was saying about her ex and how he had figured that the children could be split 50-50, because she had hired out some of the 'woman's work' and done a lot of it herself despite working, yet her H was still getting so much credit, way above and beyond what the average sahm gets, for his domestic contribution. I think her point was that women do get kicked twice and I could see where she was coming from when she said the children were hers. No-one should assume it couldn't happen to you.

I haven't read anything else she has written and I don't think after the interview linked above that I would like to try; certainly after reading through the piece I think there are better writers in the genre, and I definitely think it is an over-mined seam. However there seems to be an undercurrent here that this is a woman with too much time on her hands and I don't think this is entirely fair to her.

I gave up after a page and a half.....did I miss much?

(Yes -- my thought there was that she should have put in warmer water or more of it, maybe bubbles. My own DCs usually cried in the bath when it was time to get in, when they got soap and shampoo in their eyes, and when it was time to get out. They also went through a phase when they thought they would get sucked down the drain and cried in terror when I would pull the plug just to get them out and back to room temperature.)

Merrylegs that is brilliant .
The Guardian article should be reprinted in its entirety in Pseuds' Corner.

I actually liked one of her early books - the first one I think, but she really is unrelentingly self-interested. Plus she seems very ungracious despite her exceedingly charmed life. Maybe I am just bitter because I think if I had her career, looks, life, I would be the happiest of bunnies, but I am probably more superficial than her. The whole thing reminds me so much of Julie Myerson, this whole pimping out your family in a middle-class way in public.

I also read, and remember liking (at the time) her earliest books. I was younger and could probably relate more to the self-interest...

I'd like to know why her marriage ended. She gives the impression that she was the one who called time, but seems somewhat surprised by all the negative fallout. Is she so self absorbed that she really didn't see that coming? Or is she being a bit disingenuous - she over eggs it in places.

Can't help thinking that if she thought about her children's feelings even half as much as she thinks about her own, then her children might be happier.

That said, I think her comments on feminism were interesting and I think it is true that generally, the woman gets kicked no matter what she does. Possibly RC deserved a little of hers though - she seems remarkably unaware of anyone else's perspective.

I couldn't get past the third paragraph. Juvenilia with the aid of a thesaurus and 'dummies guide to feminism'.

Shall we all have a go? Here's my attempt, but subject matter 'making a cup of tea':

"I ached for the satisfaction of a freshly constructed receptacle of oriental leaf infusion. My day had been one of most heart-wrenching nadirs of my modern existential dilemmas - to Tetley or not to Tetley? To my horror, my treasure trove of infusions harboured none. It transpired that that most resentful of males, 'the she-man', had usurped the last infusion-satchel. It was the most brutal of expressions of his disdain for my yearning for oriental leaf infusion. I now call the episode 'the infusion confusion'. I recognised the 'infusion confusion'. It resonated with the most quiversome authenticity. However, the she-man, to this day, refuses to validate my most tenacious belief in the infusion confusion. My children - MY children - refuse to engage with me about my epiphany which the infusion confusion brought forth".

Ms Cusk, please, please, please: you must do better.

Rachel Cusk = The thinking man's Liz Jones

Ugh at Julie Myerson too. I read one of her novels - it was Not Very Good -and contained a completely self-obsessed central character who I suspect was actually the author - or was Rachel Cusk.

I luffs you, astreetcarnamed. That was achingly and newly real.

streetcar you actually made me wet myself a little bit.

Gulp, Math. YY wildstrawberry and a streetcar? Genius!

I couldn't read it. My eyes glazed over.

I knew it would be this article too. When I saw it on the front of the Guardian I was sure it would be awful but I still read it, so maybe that's what they want.

I remember her early stuff as terribly wordy and not really about anything. So more of the same.

I just don't get how she could publish this in a national newspaper given how she describes her children's feelings following the divorce. Maybe she needs the money but I would assume (maybe wrongly?) that someone like her would be able to make money from something other than mining her family's misery?

You have all made me feel so much better. I had never heard of RC before today, i just couldn't get past the awful prose.

Got quite upset, and said to DH "I'm just not edukated 'nough for the Guardian anymore".

Glad it wasn't just me then.

This is one of the many reasons DP refuses to read the Observer magazine any more - he thinks it's all self absorbed gibberish.

Guardian sorry. I like Let's Move To though!

I think she came to realise that her children's feelings were not necessarily what she imagined them to be, following her sister's remarks at the park. What she had been assuming were her children's feelings were in fact projections of her own and reflections of her guilt. All done so un-self-consciously that it makes for painful reading -- watching someone reinvent the wheel where your children are concerned, and not babies either, made me sorry for them and for her, because she brought so much of the distance and the pain in the mother child relationship upon herself and quite deliberately, or at least without understanding the value of what she was denying herself in the service of her ideal.

Tbh, I don't think she was very well able to put herself in other people's shoes (understatement) and this held true even for her children's shoes.

Wild strawberry,that's what I was going to say! I also knew this thread would be about this article,what a load of over written navel gazing old tosh! And I quite liked her book on motherhood possibly because I had crushing pnd at the time. And I'm an eng lit so I've read some shit in my time,but I thought this article was astonishingly bad.