Telling the truth about motherhood

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I find it hard to express the admiration I feel for Rachel Cusk?s new memoir.

This is no rhetorical disclaimer; it is just the pressure of a biological fact. For motherhood takes place first in the body, leaving the part of the mind that formulates sentences staggering in its trail.

I wanted to read this book as a critic, but my nerves kept intervening. The evocation of a baby?s smell brought on tears; I registered descriptions of a newborn?s crazed hunger with a mammary ache and a tensing of the jaw. I am at pains to explain the responses provoked by Cusk?s words, for they were involuntary and physical, rather than intellectually considered.

In writing a confessional ?letter? about the first year of her first baby?s life, Cusk has bravely approached a topic traditionally ? separated from the general drift of human conversation?.

More than erotic rapture, depression, jealousy, hate, or even mystical insight, the chaos of transcendence and abjection that motherhood encompasses seems to defy verbal expression. Literary history would suggest as much, even when we leave aside the important but contingent fact that motherhood provides less than obliging circumstances for reflective prose ? mothers, after all, are quite capable of drafting legal enactments or philosophical arguments if so inclined.

Pondering the centuries of literary silence about motherhood, Cusk wonders whether ?as a gender we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject?.

My own literary response to the shock of maternity 10 years ago seems, in retrospect, markedly bizarre. Battling the exhaustion and self-fissuring that Cusk so well evokes, my babe poised between breast and keyboard, I laboured at a thesis on fin-de-si?cle aestheticism.

I was on my third pregnancy before it finally emerged as a slim and esoteric yellow book with a bored-looking Aubrey Beardsley ? surely the furthest thing from a mother our species ever spawned ? on its jacket. Though all that my forgotten clique of male exquisites produced in the way of offspring was the sad, jewel-encrusted tortoise on the oriental rug in Huysmans?s novel A Rebours, they gave sanctuary to the precious image of my own disembodied intellect and kept me from the suburban toddler groups which Cusk describes with such pitiless, irresistible satire.

But one of the truths that motherhood should definitively have taught me is that our intellects are not disembodied. When it comes to pity and affection, the body guides the soul. Cusk?s unease with these emotions gives her prose its vigour and abrasiveness; it is at the heart of her often agonised dialogue of body and language, self and society.

?Compassion worms its way into me,? she records in an uncomfortable metaphor of parasitism. But even this invading charity is prompted by her new-found aggression towards the outside world of shops and things. Cusk is unapologetically urban and high-minded. When another adult succeeds in coming in on her solipsistic motherbaby drama to soothe or enlighten, it is more likely to be Coleridge or Flaubert than a health visitor or another mum.

Provincial mothers on bicycles, ?with their dumpy flowered dresses and thick white arms?, inspire in her only misogynistic disdain. The university town these disturbingly ?girlish? cake-bakers populate soon comes to incarnate all that was ?staid and humdrum and restrictingand depriving about motherhood?. Cusk keeps her own mothering operatic, febrile, strained. In the space of one paragraph describing her return home after childbirth, she feels ?bludgeoned by tragedy?, suffers ?terrible panic ? violent anger ? adulterous desire ? longing and revulsion?.