Rachel Cusk writes wonderfully. What she tells may interest more or less, but the way she does it dazzles. As the journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz said, she “could make her shopping list a fascinating read”. In her work, filigree metaphors abound, sprinkled with a peculiar sense of humor. Take the description, in A Lifetime Job, of her first pregnancy ultrasound: In the image's "sidereal space," the fetus is "a small, monochrome crustacean" "floating in the ultrasound blizzard." Or the confusion after the birth of her daughter, when the only thing that was clear to her “is that I have reproduced myself like a Russian doll. I left home being one and I come back being two”. While the sleepless nights she made her feel like “a stubborn, withered ghost, cut off from his human past.”
A lifelong work, in which she wrote about the experience of being a mother, represented her autofiction debut, a genre that has made her a reference in contemporary literature. She English but living in Paris, where she moved because of Brexit, Rachel Cusk is a citizen of the world: she was born in Canada in 1967, although she spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles. Later, her family would settle in England, where she was sent to a boarding school at age eleven, a place she described in The New Yorker as "a hotbed of female cruelty." This experience was reflected in her first novel: the award-winning Saving Agnes, published after graduating from Oxford. Since then, she has written ten more novels (most notably the A contraluz trilogy) and four non-fiction works.
Cusk was in Madrid for the translation of Un trabajo para toda la vida, published by his Spanish publisher, Libros del Asteroid. There he attended the Magazine, in a central Madrid hotel. The day is cloudy and a certain gloom reigns in the lobby: when Cusk emerges from the elevator for the photos, light, dressed in a black T-shirt and dark pants, which highlight the perfect English paleness, she almost seems unreal. During the interview, she is already in a white and bright room, she is affable and thoughtful: no, she doesn't mind talking about a book written more than twenty years ago. The passage of time, she says, has not affected this very personal work: “It is still a true book: the policies may change, but the process is the same. And perhaps it has also changed that today it is easier to explain what it feels like.
She refers to the controversy that her book caused when it was published, in 2001, and the press labeled her, among others, as an inept and unaffective mother. She is still surprised that there were people who were offended by expressing the ambivalences of motherhood. “The funny thing is that it didn't take long for the book to stop being offensive. Three years later, she was no longer offending… I think this is what happens when someone says something new: first there is a shock, but quickly people come to terms with what was so shocking”.
He considers that in A Lifelong Job there were many things that some found difficult to accept: “An era that treated motherhood in a literary way and motherhood is something that is supposedly below literature… Also there is a taboo about telling what happens in that extraordinary, crazy moment that having a baby implies. The idea that someone would complain, he annoyed ”. Is motherhood unquestionable? “Yes, because if you start to doubt… How is the world going to work? Everything is destabilized, ”she replies.
Although he had a partner, in Cusk's story, the feeling of loneliness during those first months of upbringing is striking. “Until you're in that situation, you don't realize what a big difference it makes to have support, like a mother. But the experience, in and of itself, is lonely,” she muses. The contradictions of motherhood are very present in the work: like the longing for who one was before becoming a mother and the love for children, as opposed to the love for her profession, which for Cusk is intense.
And it is that, as a child, she wanted to be a writer: "I wrote stories, diaries, took notes... I think because I always believed that adults lied, so I wanted to establish, for myself, what the truth was," she recalls, laughing . She was only about to leave literature when, in 2012, after the publication of Despojos —a sad, precise and precious chronicle about her separation—, the British press turned against her again: “I was very surprised, because one thing is to say that becoming a mother is difficult and that not everything is happiness, but if you write about a divorce, that it is not fun at all… That was the closest time I have come to stop writing”. What made her follow her? “Well, I think that her own indignation at the criticism. When things like this happen to you, you open your way to a new place and that is what writing has always generated for me”.
Honesty is another characteristic of your work: is it also so sincere, on a personal level? “Sincerity is a mechanism in my writing, not the purpose. There are many things in my life that I don't plan to tell, either because they are not interesting or because they are too private. So it's selective honesty, you could say." Picky or not, Cusk has also come under fire for putting herself out there too much. She has no doubt that this is because she is a woman: “I think there is a deep hatred of feminine honesty. When a man gets on this train, he gets applause, Karl Ove Knausgård, for example; but if a woman does it, there is much more pressure. I live in France and the reaction to the Nobel Prize for Annie Ernaux has been shocking. The poison she has received! It is a current question and, in part, the reason why I write what I write”.
Precise and without fuss, Cusk x-rays his daily life, in detail. Does she still keep a diary, like she did as a child? “No, but I do pay close attention to what is going on around me. Although my observations on people are more philosophical than detailed. Power, failure, anger, desire… All of these components in relationships are fascinating subjects.”
A recurring setting in his work is the family, the place, he explains, "that most people have as a theater: where many things can be shown and tried on." In any case, Cusk believes that perhaps this scenario is over for her: “Because I feel that I am leaving the main phase of family life. One of the reasons why I wrote my most recent book, Segunda Casa, was because my daughters went abroad to study and it impressed me: Imagine, twenty years dedicated to them and, suddenly, they are gone! In any case, she points out that she has never written about her daughter specifically, but about "a child figure."
He does not know if they have read A Job for Life. What they used to announce to him, like so many young people today, is that they did not plan to have children. What did he answer them? “I told them that bad people have many children so they should have, to compensate: good people have to have children. And that I will help them, of course, in everything I can.
