HardCheese: I suspect that the reason for the antipathy on this thread is that women pick up - often fairly semi-consciously - on the profound level of collusion-with-the-phallic that is afoot in Rachel Cusk's work. It performs a profound level of anti-woman alienation, executed through a seeming "excoriating" (huh) self-examination and self-analysis - publicly presented - and yet always fights shy, pulls punches, when it comes to the final turn of reflecting on that very antiwoman-ness.
Take, for example, that extract selected by motherinferior:
'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.'
What she's saying is that having a baby always takes bites out of a woman - at the level of body, mind, self, and public status.
That's not news on mumsnet.
We know that you can end up with a ruptured rectum, with a cunt the size of the Dartford tunnel, saggy tits, belly, etc. And equally well, you might not.
We know that your brain can turn to shit and that you can find your sense of self annihilated by the demands of a child/ren. And you might not.
We know that we then have to go out into a world that, generally, lauds mothers whilst simultaneously seems to cease regarding mothers as people. And we'll often find that in our ability to earn money.
So why present this as knowledge that you, and you alone, are in possession of? That is a representative act that annihilates the many -primarily women - who have also voiced these knowledges. And the work of those who have struggled to achieve changes and better care.
And don't get me started on the way it is represented in language. It is all as vezzie says, the middle class equivalent of the bondage-sad-face.
And the point of that? I see it as an attempt at phallic identification. The body - the physical, damaged female body is obscured and translated in a loggoreah and lexical obfuscation that is intended to clothe the writer in the mantle of non-womanhood. The body is transfigured into language, thereby becoming noon-body, non-woman; the "mind" in this dyadic transfiguration is implicitly gendered into an attempt to don the masculine.
Whilst at the same time appearing to speak "the truth" of a truamatised and ruptured femininity. (gag)
somehow, a"Woman's voice", or more precisely, women's voices, are subtly edged out of this representative space.
I think a lot of women pick up on this subtle anti-woman aggression - which is a probably a kind of self-hating but, because it is published as "a woman's voice", becomes politicised, and elides the voices of other women from this representative space - and understand that it somehow edges out other women's voices, in a kind of grotesque and horrible representation.
I have to admit, that is why I'm not fond of RC's writing, so this might well be more about me than anyone else reading the books.