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?

lots of cleverness on this thread.

An Evening Standard writer (male) today compared her to Liz Jones. Which annoyed me actually. I got his point (women who exploit their own lives for their journalism) but men get to do this for their writing and it's somehow literature (every dreary bloody book Philip Roth has ever written)...

i was thinking that margot
hanif kureishi's black album - 'master'piece?
certainly no less self regarding/cannibalising than cusk's accused of being

hanif kureishi is the perfect example of the genre.

margo, sorry

Oooh, am I being harsh about working parents? Cor. I've never been accused of that one before. What with also having worked since my daughters were four months old, and being all ball-breaking in the domestic sphere about housework, and indeed refusing to believe that there is any Intrinisc Maleness to distinguish those affected by a Y chromosome...

Going back to Cusk: quite apart from a style that I (and many others) continue to find unreadable (I think she may think she's being Keats and loading every rift with ore, but really she's just going on and on and on a lot) it is that absolute refusal to either to locate her own situation within a more general social/political one (this is one of the fundamental differences between her motherhood book and Kate Figes') or to get any blasted distance or irony on it.

I mean, if you take Sara Maitland's book about going off and becoming a silent recluse in the middle of nowhere, it's in part a book about going absolutely and completely off her trolley (To an extent which Maitland doesn't seem to realise.) It's quite uncomfortable in some ways. And in other ways it is very tight writing, and writing which locates itself within a tradition of silence and (bonkers) meditation and she laughs at herself from time to time. And that book too was written in the aftermath of a marriage breakdown, by the way.

'the Guardian's "extract" from Aftermath consisted in fact of lines taken from all over the book and compressed into something I could barely recognise as my own writing.'

From this interview with Katherine Viner.

I still might have a look at the book then.

I am interested in the ideas she talks about in the Viner interview. I'm interested in this: Motherhood is a great test. It involves enormous submission, and to submit without being extinguished is what is testing. It is definitely how I feel. So perhaps I'll be generous to RC and assume it was a criminally poor cut-and-paste job by the Guardian. Really cannot agree with Viner that her writing is "economical" though. With the best will in the world, she does verge on the waffly and verbiose.

verbiose? I need to go to bed.

One last point. I sometimes feel that I should spent less time on MN because it's a real time-stealer. But then I come across a thread like this, discussing something I really wanted to talk to smart women about. And here are a bunch of smart women discussing it and throwing new perspectives on it and just generally being interested and informed and compelling. So I'm just going to have to remain on MN. Thanks for being so interesting, everyone.

Except that now I really am going to bed.

Oh, don't get me started on Philip Bloody Roth. Some of his worst is only rescued from tedium by the wrath his misogyny provokes. (American pastoral and The Human Stain are good, though).

The point isn't that RC is worse than a male equivalent, or that she is like this because she is a woman - I don't think she is on either count. Just that she is as she is on a matter that many of us navigate with more dignity and more elegance in writing style. And unfortunately, because the world is still the way it is, many men will read the atricle and think 'bloody women, never happy, first they wnat a job, now they don't..'.

And for me, I am exasperated with the Guardian's apparantly only noticing women who whine, and women who are dead fit. (as in 'phwoar', not as in dead fit and sporty enough to appear in their bloody Sports supplement which frequently includes no sportswomen at all)

I may be one of the few who didn't hate 'a life's work' - but I read it quite a long time before I had children, and I am afraid I expect I'd hate it now. I'm not sure 'like' is quite the right word to describe what I felt about it, but I got a lot out of reading it, and discussed it at length with DH at the time.

The recent novel, about the violinist with a basement conversion... goodness- I hated it. SO dreary, I really couldn't care about any of the characters.

Guardian is not a newspaper any longer- just a gossip rag.

The Telegraph did a much better cut and paste job. At least it was readable (after a fashion).

animula, great points on here, although I am not sure how much of your first post you were retreating from.
I thought about it today and I think a lot of the hostility she provokes among women is exactly what you highlight as her separation of herself from them (us), with implicit contempt for women; and so her outrage, sadness, disappointment at being shafted just like any other woman just annoys us instead of inviting sympathy, because she thought she could choose to be different by being slimmer, working outside the home more, being more polysyllabic - and there is a touch of schadenfreude because it is a relief that it is the system that shafts us, not that we are too fat-arsed or domestic or dumb - and this is expressed as irritation that she didn't know what real life was like, that she has her head up her arse, that she thought she could do things other women can't manage by being "better" (as if there is anything wrong with the rest of us such that we deserve the exhaustion, the financial penalties, etc)

it is sad that this is so often reflexively expressed as a defence of the system which does this to us, as if a law of nature, instead of joining to take up arms against it

MI, Sara Maitland's book is lovely (and thank you for putting me onto it in the first place).

I do think SM realises when her experiences are starting to break loose from what the rest of us call reality, but her normal is still pretty eccentric in comparison with the mainstream, so perhaps the boundary is shifted a bit for her. Whereas I think RC has little or no insight into the fact that many, many other people have between them already written many thousands of paragraphs on exactly the seams that she is mining, and some of them have done it much better. She does indeed give every impression of thinking that she is the first person to have ever given birth/looked after children/split up with her husband, a level of obliviousness not generally found in adults older than about 24.

SM writes well, succinctly, and sometimes with astonishing lucidity, which is not a feature of RC's writing at any stage. And she is funny and wry, self-critical and self-insightful, which again RC is not, not at all. I have no patience with RC's writing, I just can't be bothered to wade through the verbiage. IMO if you have to read a sentence several times just so you can fully appreciate its lucid beauty, then it's good writing. If you have to read it several times in order to work out what the hell the author is on about, that's bad writing.

"a lot of the hostility she provokes among women is exactly what you highlight as her separation of herself from them (us), with implicit contempt for women;"

Yep, Vezzie and Animula, that's what gets on my tits about her, in a nutshell.

Also, she is a pretentious arse (and oddly unselfconscious about it).

Vezzie -- I tend to applaud her for writing about the shafting. It's not comforting reading but I think the fact that women get the shaft and the impact on us matters.

I think deep down every single woman who gets married or shares her life with a partner feels that she will be the one who beats the odds. That is why old women cry at weddings.

I think what I am struggling to put my finger on is how the rejection of Cusk's rejection of womankind can mistakenly misfire and double back on itself as as rejection of a rejection of the necessarily lowly lot; a sort of chin-up bravery about the status quo in order to feel more valiant and magnanimous in contrast to her whining and snottiness, which then translates into "heap more on! We can take it!"

Sometimes I am not sure if I can; I am always sure we shouldn't have to

I felt most uncomfortable reading Hanif Kureishi's 'Intimacy', which was supposed to be semi-autobiographical. The difference was that it was presented as a novel, so there is at least that technical distance, and I much prefer his writing to RC's.

I don't like her preciousness, her failure to own her stuff (she talks about it, but in that insincerely self-lambasting way that is meant to indicate she is really rather special just for doing it), her nose-wrinkling at the ghastly smelly mediocrity of the rest of humanity and especially bovine mothers, her lack of humanity and humour.

I do NOT dislike her for her ambivalence about motherhood and her willingness to declare and examine that (oh, and another WOHM here - I couldn't be less bothered that she has 'stepped outside the role'). I just wish she'd do it in a way that opened up the discussion to the rest of us, rather than drawing in her petticoats away from us.

It has to be said, though, that compared to Hanif Kureishi she is a joy and a delight.

Rachel Cusk is the very worst kind of public figure. She writes about everything that happens to her, good and bad, with a navel-gazing narcissistic, self-obsessed tone and she moans and moans. Her husband quit his career for her, and she says this gave rise to contempt and boredom, etc, and she dumped him, and now she's written a book, I suppose to pay legal fees, and to raise money so she can support him, now that he has no career. She's a dreadful writer, nothing but clichés, and a dull person. Her fame? I think it might be her face. She is beautiful. That's about the whole sum of it.

I am now starting to understand the phenomenon of witch burning.

I just finished Cusk's book at the weekend. As a femininst who paid a lot to a husband on divorce and would never suggest chidlren are mine I obviously baulk at her resentment of the fairness which comes with modern relationships. Had she wanted someone rich she should have married someone committed to their career.

I was very disappointed that the book is so short and thrown together to get a few funds together. Lots if about Greek myths and it doesn't hang together and we get none of the real detail we really want as she has to hide confidential information about her husband and divorce.

I agree with a alot of what animula writes above. I find it sad that Cusk has such a hard time of things and cannot work out happy gender relations. I also felt she had in the Life's Work book (which is very good although also a bit miserable) ended up with sexism in her relationship and not found the path many of us find of a loving equality.

I presume she wanted to keep the house and had to remortgage to buy her husband out (as did I) but that her income is not that high and she has had to take in a lodger as the book implies and things are tougher because she is a writer which is never very well paid.

I cannot understand who any parent who loves their children would want to keep them away from and not equally share them with the other parent. There seems no impression in the book that she presented this to the chidlren as wow isn't this great, you've two home life is going to be so wonderful. Instead she wallows in front of them and that is not fair to chidlren.

It was probably a foolish decision 10 years ago or whenever it was for her husband to give up law for photography and they must hvae known at the time that the consequences would like to be that things would be harder on a divorce.

It comes over as not enough giving to the children and a wallowing in misery when presumably she was the one who wanted the divorce and one suspects she may have been divorced for adultery although that may be entirely wrong.

Ah the spoof sarahditum.com/2012/02/20/after-the-aftermath/ mentioned above sums up how I felt as I read it.

It surprises me that it's not universally accepted that children come first, and should take priority over parents' needs.

For me, that's the worst thing about Cusk's writing: it's really exploitative of her dc. (Her dh can make his own howl of protest.)

Both Myerson and Cusk continue to be accepted as writers and featured as columnists in spite of the fact that they are prepared to sell their dc to the media.

In that programme about Social Services - Protecting our Children - the point was made that parents had to put children's needs first.

Doesn't that apply to the chattering classes?

It's certainly interesting to hear about other people's and it's a shame there is none of the detail in the Cusk book. It suffers because she's been discreet in some ways although her public description of the details. She has not given very much detail.

It may be best for her children if she earns the money to keep them though through writing and she does say very little about them in the book. I don't think the comparison with Myerson (who did show her son her book before it came out) is necessarily right.