Rachel Cusk uses a detached, clinical gaze in her memoir On Marriage and Separation.
There was a game I loved to play as a girl. It happened on rare occasions, at a birthday party, or at the end of a Brownie meeting when Brown Owl was left with 15 minutes to kill. Papers and pencils were distributed. The presiding adult presented a tray covered with a cloth. The children hushed, got focused; the cloth was lifted, and an array of diminutive objects revealed. A dime. An egg cup. A tiny porcelain doll. A thimble.
The objects seemed magical in the way that small things do to small people: They made up a world whose scale made sense, whose contents were stripped of embellishment. The enchantment was heightened by the brevity of the apparition.
Presently, the cloth was replaced, and we were instructed to write down everything we remembered. A simple memory exercise, yet it seemed that something more was called for. How to describe such majesty? How to do it justice? Rachel Cusk's memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation presents much the same problem.
The objects on Cusk's tray are eight short sections, easily appreciated in isolation, yet related in ways both obvious and subtle. An image of her daughter in a stag mask, frozen in the headlights of her newly fractured family. A tableau in which the baking of a birthday cake falls flat. We are in the dominion of Emily Dickinson's fragments and shards, of W.G. Sebald's black-and-white photos, at once emblematic and elusive. Cusk, too, thrives in liminality; it is precisely in unsettled, shifting terrain that her voice is most compelling and assured.
Cusk, the author of seven novels, is arguably best known for her earlier memoir A Life's Work, in which she dared to elucidate the darker side of motherhood. In Aftermath, she furthers the "feminist principle of autobiographical writing," delving into a second, equally fraught juncture in family life.
If her project is the dissection of domestic female experience, her method is decidedly male. "My mother may have been my place of birth," she writes, "but my adopted nationality was my father's." Aftermath is peopled with Greek gods, and Cusk wonders early on "whether it is one of the pitfalls of modern family life, with its relentless jollity, its entirely unfounded optimism … that it fails to recognize – and to take precautions against – the human need for war."
A book subtitled On Marriage and Separation implies confession. It's hard not to anticipate an intimate, hushed, first-person voice. We expect to be implicated in the way a listener becomes implicated, unwittingly, in a secret.
Cusk, however, uses a different tactic, applying a detached, clinical gaze to the domiciliary sphere, and this subversion is at the heart of the book's great accomplishment. A second tray comes to mind, a tray of dentists' tools. Sharp and silver, each with a distinct purpose, man-made for incision, for removal. This impulse is most apparent in a chapter titled Extraction, in which the narrator – I am hesitant even to label her as "Cusk," such is the mutability of the voice – must have a bad tooth pulled. It's a clunky analogy for divorce, one that shouldn't work, but in Cusk's hands it does, and then some.
Aftermath circles around absence and emptiness, the hole that remains post-extraction. Of her ex – whose truancy must, by definition, be the book's guiding principle – we learn almost nothing beyond a talent for making tortellini from scratch. Details of the separation itself – its antecedents, its execution – are also conspicuously absent. "If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life," Cusk writes, "I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth. … I might explain that when I write a novel wrong, eventually it breaks down and stops and won't be written any more …"
A sleight of hand is at play here, a prestidigitation that points nonetheless to a fact: Marriage is something we build in much the same way we build a fiction. It is made from our choices, and from the enactment of those choices. Like the house of cards Cusk's daughter builds in the opening pages, a misplaced breath can knock it down.
All it takes for a fiction to fail is a moment's hesitation on the part of the teller.
As though to emphasize this point, Aftermath's eighth and final section is a bona fide short story. All the emotion that has previously been so purposively contained is now sliced open, as though with a blade. This finale is melancholy and nostalgic, enough to make anyone long for home. Cusk, it is clear, has more than one set of tools.
While obviously a fictionalization of her own family – the "mother" appears with a swollen face following a trip to the dentist – the story is told in the third person, from the removed perspective of the nanny rather than one of the disaffected spouses or their children. At the book's conclusion, where a neat summation is expected, we are treated to further ambiguity. This is the story Cusk has written, but she – of such exacting, formidable talent – might equally well have written another.
Q&A with Rachel Cusk
Some readers responded to your book about motherhood, A Life's Work, with vitriolic outrage when it was published in Britain. How has reaction to Aftermath compared? How do you cope, as a writer and as a person?
The reaction to Aftermath has been far worse than to A Life's Work, yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature. When a just criticism comes my way, I recognize it and automatically begin to implement changes: I'm very much at home with criticism and disapproval. It's rudeness and ignorance that call up my defences. Much of the criticism I've had for these two books has been so violent and unpleasant that the stupidity of the critic is evident. So one can feel depressed at the stupidity, and angry for being the victim of it, both of which take up time and energy. In the case of Aftermath, the Internet and a kind of thuggish use of language that has grown up around it has resulted in a much more ubiquitous feeling of dislike for my work. And I admit that sometimes I look at my contemporaries basking in approval and wonder why I've chosen this path. Then again, I was reading an introduction to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler the other day, and the author quoted the extraordinarily brutal and personal reviews the play received when it first opened. And of course I know this is true of many writers I revere, especially D.H. Lawrence, so at least I can feel I'm in good company. That's not to say it doesn't take a toll on one's health and spirits. It does.
In an interview with The Guardian you wrote, "What I saw was that in the breakdown of marriage the whole broken mechanism of feminism was revealed." Could you elaborate?
I suppose what I meant was that my understanding of feminist politics resulted in an unsustainable version of married life, for the reason that the female pursuit of equality in marriage requires the co-operation of the male partner. And perhaps this is true and problematic of the feminist trajectory in general: First, women have to want to be equal, and then men have to let them be. What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things. How can a feminist politics make it impossible to live as a woman? Over the past two decades, there's been a palpable rejection of feminist values in the culture, and a return to old forms of femininity, particularly in the worlds of motherhood and domestic life. The suspicion that feminism de-feminizes women becomes much more problematic if their ability to parent or to conduct relationships is called into question. So feminism breaks down as a politics for living as soon as women move into areas of experience that depend on their customary self-sacrifice, because the idea that they might need and want to sacrifice themselves is repugnant to those politics. I say these things not because they reflect my own experience but because they don't: As a feminist, I found the idea of self-sacrifice abhorrent, yet what I've discovered is that the life after marriage entails more self-sacrifice than I imagined possible. There are no more roles to play, no more "equality" to be constructed, just necessity and hard work and putting your children before yourself at every turn. So it seems to me that I went a very roundabout and destructive route to understanding what the non-feminist woman perceived automatically at the start.
What were your literary models? What types of memoirs have you most admired?
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child. But it has great informal possibilities for allusion and reference, in the sense that one's own persona is allowed to act as the link to other things, to music or painting, or in the case of Aftermath, to drama. This is something I've always liked in psychoanalytic writing, the use of art as an ultimate human reality that becomes a place of reference for the psyche. In terms of genesis, Aftermath came out of repeated readings of the Orestia, which appeared to me to invert experience in that same way: I found a reality in it that was so mesmerizing and disturbing that it seemed to supersede living, and more than anything else that destructive clarity became for me a metaphor for the breakdown of institutionalized emotional structures and for divorce itself.
But I do admire many memoirs – Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, and more recently Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family – and much creative non-fiction generally, particularly the work of W.G. Sebald. It is a challenge and somewhat frightening for a fiction writer to come out from behind that carapace and write a book of autobiography, but I think it moves one's sensibility on in important ways. It represents a renewed contact with reality, a renewal of oneself as a perceiver: Artists recognize this when they paint self-portraits.
Alison Pick is the author of Far to Go, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Her memoir Between Gods is forthcoming.