The first time I encountered motherhood in popular culture was in 2001, when I was as far from wanting to be a mother as it was possible to be. I was a 23-year-old literature graduate and temp, on the pill, drifting along with my sweet, sideburned boyfriend, with whom I was living in a grotty flat. Then Rachel Cusk’s book, A Life’s Work, caught my attention because it was always being discussed in the papers. (We read the papers back then. We hadn’t got home internet yet, providing clunky dial-up connections with the wider world. Unfettered access to strangers’ lives on an hourly basis was an impossible idea, a JG Ballard novel subplot.)
A Life’s Work put forward a provocative idea of motherhood, one that stood apart from earlier dissections of the subject by second-wave feminists such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. Cusk’s approach was different: it was intensely personal for a start, as well as polemical, laying out how dreadful motherhood could be. It divided opinions wildly. “What in God’s name is Rachel Cusk, a witty young English novelist, thinking?” began Elissa Schapell in the New York Times (albeit ironically – she went on to give Cusk a rave review). “Writing a memoir of motherhood seems like career suicide.”
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