A Life's Work

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When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women. It narrates Cusk’s experience of motherhood, covering the first six months of her first-born daughter’s life. In a brief introduction, Cusk notes that the memoir was written just six months after her first daughter’s birth and while Cusk was pregnant with her second daughter. David Licata (DL):I began editing the film myself for financial reasons, but I knew I wasn’t doing the idea and the footage justice. It would have been more pleasant for them inside: the imposition was so direct that I wrote as quickly as I could.

The book generated mild controversy for its “brutal honesty” ( Publishers’ Weekly) about the reality of childcare: Cusk focuses on her struggle to maintain an independent sense of herself in the face of her child’s needs. I am struck by this distinction, for it is clear that they hunger to express themselves not as women, not as commentators or intellectuals, but as mothers. I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. After a disastrous visit to a playgroup at which both Cusk and her baby find themselves bullied by their peers, Cusk rebels against the fact that “conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies…Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams.It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced. I had identified this dishonesty in A Life's Work: it seemed to me to be intrinsic to the psychical predicament of the new mother, that in having a child she should re-encounter the childhood mechanism of suppression. Wolfgang and I had worked on my previous film, Tango Octogenario, and when I shared the idea with him, he was intrigued and said he’d love to be involved.

My previous film, Tango Octogenario, took a long, circuitous and bizarre route to the eyes of a programmer for New Directors/New Films, the showcase put on by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.Cusk feels alienated by the advice of healthcare professionals, the official literature on childcare, and the perspectives of her peers at mother-and-baby groups. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp…I no longer slept in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty, and far from home.

It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. I went into town and bought a newspaper, and turning the pages came across the first review of A Life's Work. Penelope Leach gives, I think, an accurate definition of postnatal depression: she says that in postnatal depression the mother believes that there is something faulty or abnormally difficult about her child. All through a drizzling Exmoor winter I had been writing a book, in a tiny rented place up on the moor where we stayed while we looked for somewhere to live.It was, perhaps, our isolation - idyllic though it was - that sealed these events in a profound melancholy from which I subsequently found myself unable to escape. DL:Paolo Soleri was the first to agree to be in the film, and the first interview was with him, and the first footage was of Arcosanti. I learned a lot from each of them about their particular fields, and I learned a lot about how to talk with all kinds of people. My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. Although she has decided she wants to be a mother, she is apprehensive about the dramatic upheaval a child will bring.

And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. I hired an editor, Cabot Philbrick, to edit a 30-minute sample of the film, and he really brought my ideas into focus.DL:I reached out to organizations and people who were associated with the four topics of the film: architecture, gospel music, astronomy, and arborists.