But what does she say now, now that the very thing she is most famous for writing about (female experience) is the great unsayable?
I've been thinking about this. I'm not sure that she actually does hold herself out as writing about female experience generally, but about her own experience (which might be of interest to other people, not only to women or only to mothers). She's quite explicit about this in the introduction to a later edition-
"When I wrote the book, it occurred to me that the subject matter (by which I mean not motherhood, but autobiography generally) was not interesting. I wondered, too, whether the unavoidable verbal mannerisms I brought to it by virtue of being an English middle-class novelist would alienate those readers who might most identify with and profit from its honesty. It is too late now to worry about the first misgiving, but the second troubles me still. Among the many responses, both public and private, I’ve had from male and female readers of A Life’s Work, I can’t help valuing those which make manifest its power of communication across obstacles of gender, age or social class. The man or woman who recognises in the experience of parenthood the experience of the primary disjuncture–with all its wealth of tragedy, comedy and love–between the self and others; the person who can moreover experience a book as an echo, a consolation, a mirror; the person who values the individual discovery over the institutional representation, the vicissitudes of the personal over the dishonesty of the communal: that person, whoever and wherever they are, is the person for whom I wrote this book.
As for the others–the journalists who accused me of being an unfit or unloving mother, the critics who still use my name as a byword for hatred of children, the readers who find honesty akin to blasphemy when the religion is that of motherhood–I can only suggest that they take it a little less seriously. After all, the book is governed by the subject I, not You. Most of these critics were women, and so I take this opportunity to issue a health warning to my own sex. This is not a childcare manual, ladies. In these pages you have to think for yourselves. I am not telling you how to live; nor am I bound to advertise your view of the world. Have ten children, or none; love them to distraction or lock them up; devote your life to their care or abandon them for a lover half your age: it doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t write A Life’s Work because I wanted your approval. I didn’t write it because I was vain either, or lazy, or proud, or malevolent. I didn’t write it because I hated being a mother or hated my child or hated any child. I wrote it because I am a writer, and the experience of ambivalence that characterises the early stages of parenthood seemed to me to be kith and kin of the writer’s fundamental ambivalence towards life; an ambivalence that is obscured by the organised social systems human communities devise, and that the writer or artist is always trying to recover and resolve. For the individual, this desire for recovery and resolution finds its fuel in the memory of childhood, a state the artist perhaps never entirely leaves. In becoming a mother I became, briefly, both child and parent, both individual and other, and it was this rare and fleeting exposure of the psyche that I sought to capture in A Life’s Work."