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.

I LOVE the parody.

ChucklingIntoHerLambriniWhilstFeelingForThoseChildrenTiggaxx

That parody is great

Oh,I couln't finish it. Pish and wind

It is a new Guardian section, NormanTebbit. It's got Sports at the end of it every day.

Dull, dull, dull!

Interesting interview with Katherine Viner here. I like the fact that she (RC) is very explicit that marriage is both personal/private and social/historical/political.

I always think that one of the saddest things on relationship threads is the evidence that intimate relationships going bad has a knock-on effect on (women's) subjectivity and sense of self.

Obvious points, but probably needs more cultural going-into than has been given to date. Maybe.

Really interesting questions, Mathanxiety.

Haven't read the thread, but I tried to read the article. Agree with OP. Badly written nonsense. I ended up feeling so sorry for her ex-DH.

I liked Vezzie's comment above.

I'd also like to recommend Anne Enright's Making Babies: it's the perfect counterpoint to Rachel Cusk.

I read the first page and had no idea what she was on about so gave up. Pretentious bollocks!

How does she keep getting published? (scratches head in bemusement)

That blog piece was hilarious - God I wish The Guardian would publish more clever stuff like that, instead of keeping churning out tedious stuff like the original wankfest that was the Rachel Cusk piece.

I am so glad it wasn't just me who thought it was terrible!
It bored me to tears, looonnnggg paragraphs lots of words saying very little.
What a load of drivel.
I wonder if her ex read it and patted himself on the back for getting away?

She could be making some interesting points, and the role reversal of her having to pay maintenance to her ex is an unusual and therefore intriguing one worth writing about from a feminist perspective. The trouble is, the article itself isn't very interesting or engaging. I expected to feel saddened by it, and I just found myself skimming over it and trying to work out what she was trying to say.

And I did quite like her book about motherhood, and most of Arlington whatever it was (rubbish ending though).

also love poncewank it's just perfect.

Like everyone, I knew exactly what this was going to be about from the title.

I actually want to like RC. I got a lot out of her "A Life's Work" which I know some hated but which really resonated with me. I read it after DD and then again after DS and was vigorously nodding all the way through. I do balk at the over-intellectualising of everything but then I think that's my failing rather than hers.

But there was the book club debacle which made me think she just really is a bit solipsistic. And then this piece on Saturday which I'm sad to say was virtually unreadable. Too much intellectualising, not enough narrative. I'm not sure who X, Y and Z were or what actually happened to cause her marriage to break down. It seems as though he became a house husband and came to resent her and vice versa but that's not enough to go on or to be able to empathise with either party and before you've had a chance to form a view, she's plastering on layers and layers of meaning and meta meaning and all this, frankly, OTT claptrap.

It's frustrating because, like mathanxiety (whose every word I agree with), I want to hear her ideas on relationships, marriage, feminism, work etc. I suspect I would be interested in RC's views on these things, if she had been able to explain and substantiate them clearly. Like RC, I was also brought up to work and to follow the male model, as she puts it. I am not married, I have 2 DCs and I work full time. I am head of the household, head of the family and the breadwinner. But as I don't have a partner there is no conflict there. I think she wants all those roles as well but couldn't square that with having a husband too. I get that you can have all that stuff in your DNA - it is in mine - but then struggle to reconcile that with the needs of another person. So I'm interested in how she views that. But at the end of that article, I'm no clearer.

And at the bit about leaving the cinema and her companion not following her commentary on it. She really doesn't sound much fun. I'm guessing they hadn't been to see Marley and Me

oh no. My post is long and waffly. I am RC but an RC who uses smileys

IT's not just me then! I thought maybe it only me who couldn't stand her! (not personally, but her writing)....I couldn't even get past a page of that article. I cannot get to grips with her writing style, not only this article but all her books are like this...just so self obsessed

Can you actually imagine buying that book and reading about her divorce....

I didn't know who she was but after trying to read it I saw she was described as a writer. She can't write. Her style is impenetrable. Her subject matter is herself. She should try a different career.

Thank you for that article Animula. I really applaud this point of hers and I think it is what I have been sort of groping towards:
'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.'

She also says in the Viner interview that the Guardian piece was cobbled together by the Guardian editor with sentences plucked straight from her book -- I think this accounts for the indigestibility.

Just musing here but I wonder about her recusant family background, whether coming from a family whose religion and religious choice was at the same time personal, collective, private, public, spiritual and political, made her development into an autobiographical writer inevitable. There is a tension in such a family between the individual identity and the collective family identity, the here and now and the family tradition, a 'core of contradiction'. Much of her writing explores the marches between two distinct realities.

She doesn't really need a different career cminor - she's done so well from her writing that her husband could afford to give up his job as a lawyer!

Nice post Margo. It is well-reasoned and not at all RC like!

You have also made me feel brilliant (and vastly superior to RC!) because to misquote you - I was also brought up to work (but don't see this as the 'male role model' AT ALL). I am also not married. I also have 2 DCs and I also work full time and have done since the dds were tiny. I am (financially) head of the household. But I can also square that with having a partner too, despite the fact that he was a SAHD for years and years and now earns far, far less than I do.

I really don't feel that this is a given cause for conflict, in the way her meandering and resentment seems to imply. DP didn't 'work' for a long time because he was 'working' as a parent full time, doing all the things that I chose not to do full time because I also wanted my career as well as my children. Why would that be cause for resentment? We were/are a team. The only way it seems to be a cause for resentment is if, like RC, one is a (it seems) completely self-absorbed person who didn't actually like either her partner (or indeed her children) all that much except as extentions of her own ego?

I don't think it is the physical fact of working or sharing duties that RC primarily explores, but the idea that this implies a superior status to staying home with children (an idea she absorbed from her father), and the idea that women should therefore aspire to it. Hence the self hating transvestite comment.

Remus, yes I am probably over-complicating matters with regard to the partner issue because I have never done it and I have seen (in some couples I know) that it can be difficult to avoid a power struggle. Particularly if the woman has a significant career. Because I ended up not having to manage that issue, it looms very large in my mind as a potential problem in marriage. But of course there are families where both parents are sane and equally committed to the joint enterprise of family and manage the dynamics within the family without these huge resentments that end up causing fatal problems in the relationship.

I think it goes without saying that you are superior to RC

You are clearly more patient than I am - I just thought that bit was a load of bollocks and so didn't try to understand her viewpoint there! Also the whole 'blame the parents' thing is such a cop out, no? 'I am narcissistic and unable to sustain meaningful relationships and understand that your role as parent is just as important as my role as super-big-ego writer but please don't blame me, it's all daddy's fault, really.'

Nope - I have no patience for her so stop trying to be so reasonable! :)