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?

Gotcha, Brrrr.

Coming a bit late to this, but I must say I've never understood why publishers keep publishing RC's books. Probably A Life's Work makes a contribution to literature or knowledge or something, but the rest of her oeuvre is forced and self-conscious IMO.

I think in a really good book you actually don't notice the prose style or stumble over the words, you almost don't notice the book itself is there because you're absorbed in it. Like another poster on this thread I managed about two paragraphs of that Guardian article before I scrolled to the comments.

I think she should stop wasting time on writing, change career and become a sort of celebrity psychoanalyst a la Derek Draper - she obviously finds Jung and the rest of them very interesting.

Hardch, interesting. I finished it at the weekend and thought the best and only interesting bits were in the press already. I felt cheated for paying for it. There was page after page going on about ancient Greek myths and comparing herself to those characters in a way I found dull and did not work. What I wanted was more of the bits in the press.

However I think she writes well and I hope she writes another book which I suggest should be 5x as long as Aftermath which is very very short and I felt written in a rush. There is a lot to say about divorce (I am divorced after a long marriage with children) and I am sure she will have more to write about it.

I can't imagine she is any more clever than many of us and she earns less but she certainly is bright enough and I didn't feel she shows off that brightness. She does show off her personal inadequacy, inability to mask her feelings for the sake of the children and her lack of that internal resolve, that robustness you need to deal with the slings and arrows etc.

Xenia, her first marriage lasted only a year or thereabouts, straight out of an almost nunnish existence first as a boarder at St Mary's convent Cambridge, then as a student followed by a precarious and trogloditic lifestyle as a writer. I would guess she wouldn't have ended up with much by way of equity. She bounced into the relationship with the second H fairly soon after splitting with the first.

HardCheese - yes, she writes about 'What she was feeling, rather than what she should have been feeling (like her book about motherhood)...' and I think if she wrote about robustness, strapping on her boots, eating a healthy and nutritious diet and getting on with it, she would be emotionally and intellectually dishonest, as well as not very interesting to read.

I also hope she will write more about the bed of roses that is life in the era of no fault divorce. The nature of divorce after having children and spending any longish amount of time with their father makes for a constantly evolving perspective and I would like to hear more. I felt she only glanced on the realisation that her exH hated her and I think there is definitely more material to be mined there (speaking from personal experience of this particular ice pick to the heart). Maybe a little distance from the experience would enable her to dissect it in more detail? Or maybe not -- I think her work comes across as something produced in the heat of the moment, almost in the style of a reflective journal; maybe that accounts for the impression it is written in a rush.

not read thread (not lazy exactleee- am sposed to be writing a shopping list)

Ftr- I loved A Life's Work. I still love it. And- as someone said upthread- I didn't have any friends who'd had babies when I had ds, and till then had only had yer Rosemary Leach and nice NCT books, which were all great, but didn't reflect my experience with a huge live baby- not all of it, anyway

ALW was a revelation to me. It really, really made me laugh. And I bought it just after I'd had a miscarriage, and so was Not In A Laughing Mood

I read the Guardian article, though, and my immediate thought was an eye-rolling "oh, ffs, don't do this to your kids"- or your friends, come to that. There's plenty of other things to write about.

tsk

as you were

(marking place for later, after bedtime)

In that case, ma, it sounds like they made their bed. She picks lowish paid work and her husband either fails as a lawyer or hates it and they mutually decide he will mess around at home earning a pittance as a photographer and thus has huge rights on the divorce he otherwise would not have had had he had less contact with the children and earned more. Presumably they were both clever enough to know that is the result if you choose that set up.

What is frustatnig is that unlike her views about the children in a Life's Work if she writes about the divorce her husband's privacy rights mean she cannot really write about what we want tok now about. Why does he hate her? I'd lke to know the reasons. She could have written fiction instead and said more perhaps.

A journalist writes about her separation in today's Times and again she cannot say why and just says the reasons don't matter ( a lady). T Lott in the Times also writes about his and fails to mention his depression which presumably made the lot (oops) of his first and indeed second wife and both sets of children pretty awful but doesn't write about that side of it.

They may both have been clever, but I doubt if people generally go in to marriage or make decisions about income/staying at home having thoroughly researched divorce law first. The attitude most people bring in to marriage is to assume both parties are going full steam ahead and both are committed to making the marriage work.

The doesn't have to be any reason to hate someone. It's very possible to make up reasons. Hatred can grow and flourish in the heart of the hater and be nourished by all sorts of irrational thoughts or even psychotic ones. I still don't know what my own gay porn loving exH had against me, but his hatred of me was palpable when we were living under the same roof. It's not my fault he was gay or bisexual and that marriage to me didn't cure him of that.

Most people who hate like that, in a way that shows, in a way that the object of the hatred can see and feel, are nuts, imo.