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The Woman Who Thinks She Can Choose Femininity, Can Toy With It Like The Social Drinker Toys With Wine - Well, She's Asking For It, Asking To Be Undone, Devoured, Asking To Spend Her Life Perpetrating A New Fraud, Manufacturing A New Fake Identity, Only This Time It's Her Equality That's Fake.

-Rachel Cusk

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The Woman Who Thinks

Rachel Cusk

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The Woman Who Thinks She Can Choose Femininity, Can Toy With It Like The Social Drinker Toys With Wine - Well, She's Asking For It, Asking To Be Undone, Devoured, Asking To Spend Her Life Perpetrating A New Fraud, Manufacturing A New Fake Identity, Only This Time It's Her Equality That's Fake.

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A Neighbor Is Something That Belongs To The Stable World Of Home Life, The Thing That Lives Next Door To You.

A Creative Writing Workshop Will Contain Students Whose Ambitions And Abilities, Whose Conceptions Of Literature Itself, Are So Diverse That What They Have In Common - The Desire To Write - Could Almost Be Considered Meaningless.

Christianity Has Kept Itself Going For Centuries On Hope Alone, And Has Perpetrated All Manner Of Naughtiness In The Meantime.

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.

A Sentence Is Born Into This World Neither Good Nor Bad, And That To Establish Its Character Is A Question Of The Subtlest Possible Adjustments, A Process Of Intuition To Which Exaggeration And Force Are Fatal.

Childhood, After All, Is Not An Ending, But Rather A State Full Of Potent Curiosity.

If Love Is What Is Held To Make Us Immortal, Hatred Is The Reverse.

Reality Might Be Described As The Eternal Equipoise Of Positive And Negative.

The Creativity Of Childhood Was Often Surrendered Amid Feelings Of Unworthiness. So The Idea That others Are Demanding To Be Given It Back - To Be "taught" - Is Disturbing.

I Don't Really Believe In Stories, Only In The People Who Tell Them.

It Is Interesting How Keen People Are For You To Do Something They Would Never Dream Of Doing Themselves, How Enthusiasticall Y They Drive You To Your Own Destruction.

That's Writing For You: When You Make Space For Passion, It Doesn't Turn Up.

Writing, More Than Any Other Art, Is Indexed To The Worthiness Of The Self Because It Is Identified In Peoples Minds With Emotion.

Feminism Remains Something That Needs To Be Explained To People.

An Eating Disorder Epidemic Suggests That Love And Disgust Are Being Jointly Marketed, As It Were; That Wherever The Proposition Might First Have Come From, The Unacceptability Of The Female Body Has Been Disseminated Culturally.

Eating Disorder

It Is Living, Not Thinking, As A Feminist That Has Become The Challenge.

The Anorexic Body Is Held In The Grip Of Will Alone; Its Meaning Is Far From Stable. What It Says - 'notice Me, Feed Me, Mother Me' - Is Not What It Means, For Such Attentions Constitute An Agonising Test Of That Will, And Also Threaten To Return The Body To The Dreaded 'normality' It Has Been Such Ecstasy To Escape.

Help Is Dangerous Because It Exists Outside The Human Economy: The Only Payment For Help Is Gratitude.

As Writers Go, I Have A Skin Of Average Thickness. I Am Pleased By A Good Review, Disappointed By A Bad. None Of It Penetrates Far Enough To Influence The Thing I Write Next.

I Felt That I Could Swim For Miles, Out Into The Ocean: A Desire For Freedom, An Impulse To Move, Tugged At Me As Though It Were A Thread Fastened To My Chest. It Was An Impulse I Knew Well, And I Had Learned That It Was Not The Summons From A Larger World I Used To Believe It To Be. It Was Simply A Desire To Escape From What I Had.

Modern Morality Is All About Perception.

Leaving Things Behind And Starting Again Is A Way Of Coping With Difficulties. I Learnt Very Early In My Life That I Was Able To Leave A Place And Still Remain Myself.

Society In The English Countryside Is Still Strangely, Quaintly Divided. If Black Comedy And A Certain Type Of Social Commentary Are What You Want, I Think English Rural Communities Offer Quite A Lot Of Material.

The Woman Who Thinks She Can Choose Femininity, Can Toy With It Like The Social Drinker Toys With Wine - Well, She's Asking For It, Asking To Be Undone, Devoured, Asking To Spend Her Life Perpetrating A New Fraud, Manufacturing A New Fake Identity, Only This Time It's Her Equality That's Fake.

I Think A Lot Of Artists No Longer Want To Participate In Or Be Associated With Narrative Because Of Its Corruptedness In Contemporary Culture.

I Suppose, I Said, It Is One Definition Of Love, The Belief In Something That Only The Two Of You Can See.

I Have Absolutely No Concept Of Work, Except For University. But I Like To Talk To People A Lot About Their Jobs.

Having Your Second Child, In Case You Were Wondering, Is A Lot Harder Than Having Your First, Except For Those People Who Find It Easier. I'm Afraid I Don't Have The Latest Figures To Confirm This.

I Don't Go To Church Any More, But I Think That Catholicism Is Rather Like The Brand They Use On Cattle: I Feel So Formed In That Catholic Mould That I Don't Think I Could Adopt Any Other Form Of Spirituality. I Still Get Feelings Of Consolation About Churches.

Hope Is Like One Of Those Orchids That Grows Around Toxic Waste: Lovely In Itself - And An Assertion, If You Like, Of Indefatigable Good - But A Sure Sign That Something Nasty Lies Underneath.

The True Self Seeks Release, Not Constraint. It Doesnt Want To Be Corseted In A Sonnet Or Made To Learn A System Of Musical Notations. It Wants Liberation, Which Is Why Very Often It Fastens On The Novel, For The Novel Seems Spacious, Undefined, Free.

For Me, A Novel Is Always The Result Of My Attempt To Impose Myself On Raw Circumstances. It Is A Concrete Form Of Lived Experience.

The British Have Always Made Terrible Parents.

Like The Child, The Creative Writing Student Is Posited As A Centre Of Vulnerable Creativity, Needful Of Attention And Authority.

Human Beings Have A Need, Generally, To Destroy Things. The Freudian Principle Of Civilisation Is Correct. There's Always, Always A Difference Between The Family Image And The Reality.

What Other Grown-up Gets Told How To Do Their Job So Often As A Writer?

As It Stands, Motherhood Is A Sort Of Wilderness Through Which Each Woman Hacks Her Way, Part Martyr, Part Pioneer; A Turn Of Events From Which Some Women Derive Feelings Of Heroism, While Others Experience A Sense Of Exile From The World They Knew.

I'm A Novelist, Not A Social Scientist Or A Commentator.

In Domestic Life The Woman's Value Is Inherent, Unquantifiable; At Home She Exchanges Proven Values For Mythological Ones. She "wants" To Be At Home, And Because She Is A Woman She's Allowed To Want It. This Desire Is Her Mystique, It Is Both What Enables Her To Domesticate Herself And What Disempowers Her.

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.

I Am A Good And Interested Mother - Which Has Surprised Me.

There Is A Slovenly Disrespect For Truth And Reality That Has Infected And Cross-infected The Arts; The Values Of Entertainment Are Relentlessly In The Ascendant, To The Extent That It Becomes Virtually Impossible To Write A Naturalistic Fictional Sentence Without Feeling That The Fabric Of That Sentence Is Already Compromised.

The Writing You Allude To Is A Form Of Dissent, But It's Also Expressive Of The Need To Evolve Beyond What Is Turgid And Stale In Contemporary Fiction.

Contemporary Fiction

My Children Are Living, Thinking Human Beings. It Isn't In My Power To Regret Them, For They Belong To Themselves.

It's A Pretty Brutal Process, Having A Baby.

The Distinctive Feature Of My Family Was Intolerance Of Sensitivity And Emotion - Everything's Great, It All Has To Be Great All The Time And Why Do You Have To Spoil It? Whereas Probably The Most Fundamental And Important Thing To Me Has Been Defending My Right To Tell The Truth About How I Feel.

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.

I Remain Fascinated By Where You Go As A Woman Once You Are A Mother, And If You Ever Come Back.

Honest Criticism, I Suppose, Has Its Place. But Honest Writing Is Infinitely More Valuable.

Parenthood, Like Death, Is An Event For Which It Is Nearly Impossible To Be Prepared. It Brings You Into A New Relationship With The Fact Of Your Own Existence, A Relationship In Which One May Be Rendered Helpless.

New Relationship

Every Time I Write A Book, I've Probably Taken Five Years Off My Life.

Hope Is One Of Those No-win-no-fee Things, And Although It Needs Some Encouragement To Survive, Its Existence Doesn't Necessarily Prove Anything.

I Was Aware, In Those Early Days Of Motherhood, That My Behaviour Was Strange To The People Who Knew Me Well. It Was As Though I Had Been Brainwashed, Taken Over By A Cult Religion. And Yet This Cult, Motherhood, Was Not A Place Where I Could Actually Live. Like Any Cult, It Demanded A Complete Surrender Of Identity To Belong To It.

I Absolutely Don't Dislike Children - I Would Choose Their Company Over Adult Company Any Time.

There Are Certain Types Of Slightly Hysterical Human Characters Who, Rather Than Creating, Walk Around With A Sense Of Their Own Potential - It's As If They Themselves Were Art Objects. They Feel As If Their Lives Are Written Narratives, Or Pieces Of Music.

You Could Time A Suburban Story By Your Watch: It Lasts As Long As It Takes A Small Furry Animal That's Lonely To Find Friends, Or A Small Furry Animal That's Lost To Find Its Parents; It Lasts As Long As A Quick Avowal Of Love; It Lasts Precisely As Long As The Average Parent Is Disposed On A Tuesday Night To Spend Reading Aloud To Children.

Shame Is Something You'll Find A Lot Of - Particularly Catholic - Girls Feel About Their Bodies, About Their Sexuality, About Their Diet, About Anything You Like. Shame Is The Way You Keep Them Down. That's The Way To Crush A Girl.

To Become A Mother Is To Learn A Whole Language - To Relearn It, Perhaps, As It Was The Tongue To Which We Were Born - And Hence Gain Entrance To A Forgotten World Of Comprehension.

Even If They Knew The Truth Of Their Own Feelings, Most Mothers Would Be Socially And Emotionally Incapable Of Revealing It.

I'm Waiting For The Day When My Children Cease To Find My Domestic Propriety Reassuring And Actually Find It Annoying.

How Can There Be So Many Mothers In The World But So Little Sense Of What It Might Be To Become One?

A Feminist Man Is A Bit Like A Vegetarian: It's The Humanitarian Principle He's Defending, I Suppose.

We Who Were Born Were Not Witnesses To Our Birth: Like Death, It Is Something We Are Forever After Trying To Catch Sight Of.

Divorce Also Entails The Beginning Of A Supposition That That Familial Reality Might Have Obstructed One's Ability To Perceive Others.

There Is Always Shame In The Creation Of An Expressive Work, Whether It's A Book Or A Clay Pot. Every Artist Worries About How They Will Be Seen By Others Through Their Work. When You Create, You Aspire To Do Justice To Yourself, To Remake Yourself, And There Is Always The Fear That You Will Expose The Very Thing That You Hoped To Transform.

The 'good' Mother, With Her Fixed Smile, Her Rigidity, Her Goody-goody Outlook, Her Obsession With Unnecessary Hygiene, Is In Fact A Fool. It Is The 'bad' Mother, Unafraid Of A Joke And A Glass Of Wine, Richly Self-expressive, Scornful Of Suburban Values, Who Is, In Reality, Good.

People Are Least Aware Of Others When Demonstrating Their Own Power Over Them.

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