Rachel Cusk - why is she having to support her dh following her divorce?

[mrsreplicant]

Sorry to be naive - have never done divorce myself. She seems to be saying that because her dh gave up his job to look after the dc, she will always have to support him now that they are divorced/ing. [?] From what I read, it sounds like she will have to support him even after the dc are grown up.

Can anyone elaborate?

The bit that particularly drove me to the brink - the brink, I tell you, I was gibbering - was the bit in her Ooh I Had A Baby Oh Sensitive Me book where she wants - no shit Sherlock - some childcare. Does she do what normal people do? Does she ring up her local children's services department for a list of childminders and/or nurseries? Does she enquire, perchance, of the NCMA about any local availability? (All of which, dear reader, I personally did and I bet quite a few of you did too.) Oh no. That is far too earthy and prosaic for Mizz Cusk, who IIRC puts up an ad, - a surefire way, here on Planet Normal, of getting some really quite unsuitable applicants - or possibly just feels a bit more overwhelmed, I can't remember which.

I suspect husband got award as his situation is parallel to macfarlane case (in this case it was wife who gave up legal career and compensation was to reflect that). This is a comparatively recent case (5 years old?) and the compensation element for lost career is really only going to be relevant in bigger money cases.
That said the open ended nature of it is odd- you would think that there should be a cap/time limit on this.

Glad I'm not being that naive about the open-ended nature of it. Left me rather open-mouthed. Especially since friends of mine could've done a lot, lot better than they did, it appears.

Rachel Cusk is a brilliant novelist. I don't think this is her best piece of writing, possibly because she wrote it when she was still desperately distressed - the prose certainly sounds a lot more incoherent than usual.

I don't get the judgemental responses - I think it's an appallingly honest piece of writing (and she's publicising a memoir which is about to come out, hence the fact of this extract appearing in several places - she clearly needs this to sell, as this is her bread and butter, especially if she is continuing to support her ex-husband) in which she bares her own nasty, grieving, unattractive responses to the end of her marriage.

She's not asking for sympathy or stating the facts as in a court case, she's detailing her own irrational, panicked, unlovely feelings. Unfortunately, as in her A Life's Work, she's not being judged as a writer, but as a wife and mother. (And for what it's worth, I'm about to give birth for the first time, and I'm very glad to have read A Life's Work.)

I agree this divorce memoir extract is an unattractive bit of writing - and I did worry about the ethics of the impact on her children - but I also think it's admirable. I have no such experience myself, but I know female friends whose marriages have had to be renegotiated in unexpected ways when they took over the role of breadwinner and their partners/husbands became stay at home fathers.

I don't agree about her writing: certainly not about her memoir style. It's too...Julie Myerson for me. Too 'open the doors and watch the beating of my Very Sensitive Heart'. As opposed to, say, Hilary Mantel (who writes about the absolute devastation of her endometriosis), or Jackie Kay - who drops, parenthetically, into her story that her partner had told her she didn't love JK any more - or Hannah Pool, who tackles some aspects of her story with devastating honesty and leaves others (her adoptive mother's suicide) again, parenthetical.

It's not the TMI aspect. It's the utter 'oh poor me' of it that I find hard to handle. The overlush prose style. The sense of...self-congratulation, the over-writtenness of it.

'It has existed in a kind of banishment, my flesh history with my daughters. Have I been, as a mother, denied? 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 ? all unmentioned, wilfully or casually forgotten as time has passed. And I was part of that pact of silence: it was a condition of the treaty that gave me my equality, that I would not invoke the primitivism of the mother, her innate superiority, that voodoo in the face of which the mechanism of equal rights breaks down.'

I rest - slightly nauseated - my case...

Another one here who found A lifes work to be pretentious drivel. Going by the extract in the Guardian her current book is living up to that standard. I would have thought her husband would be ecstatic to be out of that marriage.

I loved Alife's Work - it saw me through some dark days of bf my colicky DS and The Country Life is really funny but sadly RC seems to have become increasingly self absorbed and now has completely over pomped herself.

If I were her husband I would feel quite upset that our divorce has had to become so public.

Nah, Kate Figes' book Life After Birth is much better. Puts a bit of cultural/social/political context onto it all. And better written.

I loved Arlington Place rate her fiction. Never read the auto biog stuff tho

Fair enough, her prose style isn't for everyone, but it's the same prose style she uses in her fiction - it's not something intrinsic to her non-fiction autobiographical books. It's just the way she thinks in language, as far as I can see. And, while I've never been divorced, ten minutes on this forum can introduce me to forty different kinds of post-divorce heartache, self-pity, misery, rage, desire to punish ex etc etc - does the fact that RC has written a book about her experience exclude her from the sympathy usually offered to divorcing/separating women on this forum?

I also don't get the accusations of self-absorption - I doubt it's possible to write a memoir without being self-absorbed for a period - and (again, I have no personal experience here) wouldn't the aftermath of a miserable separation and divorce tend towards making you self-absorbed, miserable and angry? Just as having a baby is (presumably - I'll know myself within a month) a tremendous, not-always-pleasant shock, especially with a difficult, fractious baby?

I suppose I'm just wondering why this part of Mumsnet - which is generally very generous and non-judgemental towards people dealing with separations and divorces - seems to be so hostile to this piece? Why the requirement for a published writer to put a brave face on things, when the rest of us can come on here and moan and wail with our hair unbrushed and our make-up smeared to our hearts' content, and be treated generally very kindly?

I'm objecting to it purely on the basis that it's bad writing, actually. And I think you should go and have a look at some other memoirs to see how those writers do manage it.

Just to point out, we don't have lawyers in Britain.

I have never been so angry over a book than I was about A Life's Work. I read it when 7mths pregnant with dc1. I hated it.

Now, I used to be a RC fan. I loved her debut, Saving Agnes, but in retrospect it might be that I read it age 20, and was as self-asborped then as Rachel Agnes. I was at the same stage in my life and it really spoke to me. Although to be fair, looking back at it, I think it was decently recent.

The Temporary however - flippin' nora, what a disappointment. And I agree with a pp - it was so woman hating. Full of cariactures and shoddily written. It was as if a staff writer at Nuts or Loaded decided to try their hand at a 'literary' novel.

Still, I remained loyal. And given I was 7 months pregnant when I discovered she'd written A Life's Work, I was really looking forward to her imparted wisdom. But it made me rage, then rage some more. Then laugh at the utter hypocricsy of it. Because the whole book is her struggle with her baby daughter, who reaches toddlerhood in the book. And yet, in the acknowledgments, is a breezy sentence about how her then DH gave up work to look after the children so she could write a book on being a mother
So all her wailing about no time to herself to write, or the relentless neediness of babies, and she'd stopped doing the lion's share of childcare while her dc1 was younger than 1. Utter shite.

I couldn't get through the article tbh, awful prose.

I LOATHE RC with a passion. Her writing is gopping and I cannot CANNOT read it (I tried to read that blardy guardian article earlier today, and could not get past the first few paras before scrolling down for an AGE to read the comments.......).

Utterly utterly self obsessed. Have no idea what the husband is all about but I feel sorry for him on principle.

(waves at MI)

Oh, and I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but give me Julie Myerson over Rachel Cusk any day.

I'm quite conversant with contemporary memoir, thanks, Motherinferior (and share your admiration for Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost) - I simply happen to think that RC is as good a writer in a very different way. (Having said that, some of HM's short autobiographical pieces, while less baroque in style, are almost as nakedly angry and self-pitying as anything RC has written. And blindingly good with it.) But I appreciate our prose tastes are just different.

What I still find interesting is the spitefulness of responses to her work's content - leaving aside her style - especially female responses.

I honestly will have to give up my beloved Guardian at the weekend if we keep getting these utterly dreary, self absorbed miserable and pathetic articles by women. This, on top of the weekly dousing in tears of self-pity from bloody Diary of a Separation women, is TOO MUCH.

I couldn't make head nor tail of what exactly her problem with her marriage was. She trotted out some gratingly awful interpretations of feminism, and seems to plan her whole life on what might happen in the next 10 mins and in reaction to some slight she feels she ought to feel.

And her writing is dreadful, IMO. Overwrought, too many conceits and tortuous metaphors and similes.

Please, Guardian....it's like having middle class misery lit posted thorugh my letterbox every Saturday.

HardCheese -I resent the image of women that the constant curating of these articles gives. I am politically angry, not spiteful.

I hated the article and found it self obsessed winey drivel and felat sorry for her husband and kids. If her husband has been a house husband for several years then he isn't a "lawyer" (agree this is an American term anyway) but one of thousands of people with a law degree who aren't currently working in law. I do however think the English divorce system is less fair than the scottish system where you only have to support a previously nonworking parent until they get a qualification, so in his case she wouldn't be supporting him for long if at all. You split financial stuff equally and then just pay CSA amounts for the kids, alimony isn't recognised.
If a woman chooses to be the main wage earner in England she has to accept she will be treated the same as a man in her position. That is equality.
As a writer I would have thought she and her husband could have chosen to both work part time. They chose not too.
I would have had alot more sympathy for her if she hadn't come across as so self centred and "poor me". I read it in the Guardian yesterday and thought it was maybe just me being insesitive then read all the comments on the Guardian website.
I think moaning about your divorce on an anonymous forum is completely different to a one sided account of your divorce in the media and print.
How many women here would like it if their ex was a writer and wrote about their divorce, casting himself as hard done by victim?

We do have lawyers.
As far as I understand it they are generally divided into solicitors and barristers, but I know several people who describe themselves as lawyers

What's interesting is the way that we take for granted the fact that alimony ceases on remarriage. Its only when a man is the recipient that it became obvious to me quite how regressive an idea it is that "she's got another man to look after her now".

Ah yes, Rachel Cusk. I have real problems with her - as a writer and as a person. But, you know, I'm sure the divorce is tough for everyone...

Actually Hardcheese I don't think that any other MNer who came on here would get a ton of sympathy if her thread was basically along the lines of "AIBU to not want to support or share custody with my ExH after he gave up his career to be a SAHD whilst I whined about it in print ".

I think it is hypocritical of her to not wish to support her ex-partner in that case, just as I feel it would be bang out of order for a bloke to do that to his female ex. If you are in a relationship where one person earns and one person does the majority of the childcare / housework then the earning partner does have a responsibility to support the other. Ideally, of course, this would take place in the context of a long and happy relationship but if the relationship breaks down then the person who has put their own earning potential on hold (and in many cases nixed it for good) should still be entitled to that support.

I am more than willing to concede that being a male ex-lawyer has probably enabled Mr Ex-Cusk to negotiate a much more advantageous settlement than many women in his position. But that doesn't mean that he is not entitled to support - merely that many women in his position are stiffed by the system or stitched up by the expensive lawyers that their exes can afford and they cannot.