Rachel Cusk: The myth of motherhood

Her controversial new account of parenting is passionate, dark and without sentiment. Is that why Rachel Cusk has been branded a bad mother, asks Maureen Freely

These are just a few of the books I own on the M word: Of Woman Born, Becoming a Mother, Mother with Child, The Fruits of Labour, Mothering, Maternal Thinking, Mad to be a Mother: Is There Life After Birth for Women Today? Mothers on Trial, The Mother Wars. I've read hundreds more over the past 20 years, as have many millions of others as we've muddled through pregnancy and beyond. No one could claim this to be uncharted territory, and yet to write about it truthfully is still to plant a time bomb.

Rachel Cusk, prize-winning novelist, has been finding this out the hard way. The reception for A Life's Work, her dark, uncompromising account of her early days of motherhood, has been what polite people called "mixed". There seems to be no middle ground, though. People either embrace it with anguished relief or reject it out of hand. Critics belonging to the second camp have not been content to condemn just the book. They want her to burn at the stake, too. The virulence of the attacks has left her gasping. "I can understand someone saying they don't agree with my response to motherhood. But in the bad reviews they've said, 'Look at her, she went and climbed up a mountain when she was pregnant, she confines her child to the kitchen like an animal, what kind of mother does that?' They've said, she seems to love her child, but she hates that love. They've said, 'You're a bad mother, we disown you, busy mothers won't have time to read this'. It is as if the organism of good mothers has produced an antibody to reject me. It's made me think that I can go back to my book and say that I was right to find the culture of motherhood completely suffocating."

For me, the book is a breath of fresh air. This may be because I can keep my distance: she is describing a transition I went through 23 years ago. But even so, it still got to me. It still took me back to raw emotions long since edited from my official history. So I am not sure what I'd think of it if I didn't have children. If I were a mother-to-be, I think I would find it rather frightening. But if I were still in the midst of it, and not sailing through it as effortlessly as I'd expected, I expect I would seize on the book in the same frame of mind as Noah did his ark.

Although it's a true story, it's very much a novelist's book, stark and sculpted and full of ambiguous shadows. It is (if you can take it) so funny it hurts. Her descriptions of postpartum near-madness are uncompromising and exact. There are no shoulds and musts, no grinning and bearing it. No exemplary anecdotes or pep talks or cautionary tales. Nowhere does she suggest that her experience is typical. She neither applauds herself for her success nor flails herself for climbing that mountain or failing to keep her daughter from hitting her head when she tipped over that highchair in that kitchen.

What she does instead is try and chart the strange and curious emotions that so take her by surprise and overrun her life during her first pregnancy and her first year as a mother. It is a love story, by the way, but a love story denuded of all sentimental comforts. She shows the terrors and confusions out of which this love emerges, and shows, too, how the ambivalence never goes away. When her daughter was six months old and she found out she was pregnant again, she saw it as another prison sentence. She recalls greeting her "old cell with the cheerless acceptance of a convict intercepted at large."

The second time around was just as intense, but not as disorientating as the first. The biggest surprise was returning to a state of mind she'd already managed to forget. It would have been less amazing, she told me, if there had been four or five years between the two births and she'd been running around in between wearing "size 10 trousers". But the two pregnancies were so close that she couldn't fail to note how quickly amnesia could set in. She decided to set down her thoughts before she forgot them yet again.

Born in Canada in 1967, and raised in Los Angeles until the age of eight, she spent the rest of her childhood in Suffolk and Cambridge and went on to do a degree in English at New College, Oxford. That was in 1988. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, came out in 1992 and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her third novel, The Country Life, won the Somerset Maugham Award. She had, she says, always known she wanted to have children one day. But she had always been just as sure that the many privileges she had enjoyed during the first three decades of her life would guarantee a seamless, onwards and upwards passage into motherhood. "All my expectations were intellectual and creative. I was equal and liberated, a different kind of woman. All those people who had spent 25 years at home looking after this child and that – they did that because they didn't have the opportunities I did. I'm sure I thought that. And then undid it."

As for all those books and articles and older women who might have disabused her of her illusions? "It was my impression, when I became a mother, that nothing had been written about it at all; this may merely be a good example of that tone-deafness I describe, with which a non-parent is afflicted whenever a parent speaks, a condition we acquire as children and which leads us as adults to wonder with bemusement why were were never told – by our friends, BY OUR MOTHERS! – what parenthood was like."

If mothers fall into traditional ruts they've always sworn they would avoid, it is, she thinks, because "there's no let-up. You go from the vagueness of pregnancy into the full-on roller-coaster of mother. Your husband comes home for a week and when he goes back to work, I don't think you're in any state to say, 'what do you think you are doing, where are you?' She also thinks that many women actively discourage fathers from playing a more active role. "If you've spent 10 or 20 years in which the main expression of love is romantic love for men, there is something about love for a baby that can be an alternative. All those years I wanted men to like me and they caused me so much pain and anxiety and now here is a blank slate I can love and control." But once new parents slip into the old ways, they have a hard time stepping out of them.

"There are two issues here. One is the fairly drab in the sense of stupid culture of motherhood that doesn't legislate for complexity and doesn't allow you to express yourself. The other is absolutely political and social. We have inequality at home. And if we have it at home, we'll also have it at the workplace, because women who have inequality at home are having to compete with men who benefit from it."

And her own home? Well, after a year of the above, she and her partner decided to throw it in and give themselves another chance. When friends asked her partner what he was going to do with his life now that he no longer had a desk of his own, he told them that he was going to look after the children while Rachel wrote a book about looking after the children. They didn't laugh, and neither did they expect the experiment to work. But a year into their new life in their house on the edge of Exmoor, it looks as if they were right to jump. "I suppose at this point I've come out the other side of it. I'm working again. I've got help. My partner is at home and he shares the childcare and that has enabled me almost to resume my old relations. I haven't made new friends who have children, but I have two old friends who had children and we e-mail each other endlessly.

"I thought I would never be able to write again. The fact of being not alone even when my child wasn't there, made me think I would never again experience solitude intensely enough. I didn't see how I could recapture that. But now, and I don't know if my writing is the better or the worse for it, I enjoy being circumscribed and having limited time. I'm more practical about my life and my time. I know I have to get on with it. What I have to say is probably the same but I'm more able to fish it out. My main interest has always been women's experience of interior life and that won't change, but now children are a part of it."

She enjoys it, and loves it, because she allowed herself to write about the bad patches along the way. "Without this book I would have been very preoccupied with needing to say it. But now I've said it." And having said, she's waiting to see if anyone picks up the baton.