In praise of the bleak, the foreboding, the claustrophobic depictions of motherhood
Thoughts on the critical reception of writing by women
People expect a lot from mothers and even more from those who write about their experience of being one. After the publication of Rachel Cusk’s memoir of new motherhood, A Life’s Work, one reviewer wrote, “If everyone were to read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame.” Another called the book “at times bleak and foreboding” and not a “cheerful baby shower gift.”
Implicit in both critiques is the idea that writing about motherhood should market motherhood to women rather than doing literally anything else—and that the “motherhood memoir” should only appear in public as a kind of propaganda tool designed to pull women who are on the fence about having babies over to what is definitely not supposed to be framed as the dark side.
The blind spots that surrounded criticism of Cusk’s early work may be a bit a sign of those times. A Life’s Work came out in 2001 and reviews of Cusk’s writing have since taken on a kind of cult status for the way they openly illustrate the narrow male literary gaze (others have critiqued Cusk’s avant-garde status for compelling reasons). Readers of books about motherhood today may have a clearer understanding of how being a woman and a mother can shape the critical reception of one’s book, but critics still often seem to forget.
2018 was a busy year for the “mom book.” That wave of mom books often got lumped together critically as, well, mom books, just as the next wave of books that came with the pandemic did—even though those books spanned style and form. The problem, Sarah Blackwood wrote that year for LARB, is that “when motherhood is figured as a subject that transcends genre or mode of expression, the discussion takes on a particular tone of assessment that can’t help but feel weirdly personally evaluative: how relatable was the treatment of the subject?”
The frequently feminized confessional tradition, of which the memoir is part, is held to similarly impossible standards— to be not just relatable, but universally so. In a well-known review of Gina Frangello’s 2021 Blow Your House Down, one critic attacked Frangello’s writing citing “the literary trouble with rage.” The reviewer claimed that Frangello didn’t understand the “difference between blurting out a series of personal truths and shaping a narrative, powered by observed rage and disciplined thought, that just might touch the universal thread.” The review did not, however, explore in-depth the many ways in which anger and literary judgments are deeply gendered. For instance, how power “disciplines” thought and feeling, and the many “shapes” a narrative might take, and the very definition of memoir as a practice of hunting for “universal” truth.
This concept of universality is quite different from collective truth, something closer to what Lauren Berlant called an “intimate public,” created by a set of cultural objects that speak to a certain identity category or community, estimating a sense of belonging. Universality is nevertheless often evoked as a mark of a book’s or artwork’s moral goodness (and Art-ness). This is especially true for memoir. Young writers are often taught to hunt for “universal” truths in their own life stories, rather than to acknowledge the limits of their own perspectives, or even to embrace those limitations as part of the story.
In critiques of motherhood memoirs, another charge re: universality is often leveled at the writer: the assumption that the writer who is also a mother just couldn’t possibly have enough time to achieve such an ideal, on a craft level. One critic, for example, supposed that Cusk “might not have had as much time or energy to write as she’d have liked” because she was a mother.
This charge—that motherhood memoirs are sloppy or ill-conceived because of mommy brain or a lack of time—is a common one because a mother-writer is always too mother or too writer. She could never feasibly execute both forms of work at the same time and the possibility that she might set down her maternal labor for her literary work (or that someone else might care for the kids and home), apparently, baffles. Conversely, the mother who critiques or laments any aspect of motherhood, today, is often painted as overly ambitious, too invested in her work as a writer, or thinker, or simply in waged work proper.
In a review of Louise Erdrich’s memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance, one critic remarked that the book was “occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer, but the bond between mother and infant has rarely been captured so well.” Erdrich is mere mother, straining to have it all. Her “rare” ability to capture the bond between mother and infant, though, is not enough to confer on her the self-important title Writer—because what’s a rare depiction of the bond between mother and infant if not something niche and trivial, certainly not literary or intellectual? Certainly that kind of skill is not worthy of the name Writing!
A more generous and thoughtful review of Cusk’s A Life’s Work admonished her for not applying the narrative tools she had at her disposal to flesh out the husband and baby characters in her book more fully. “The lack of detail contributes to the book’s claustrophobia,” that reviewer wrote. Rounding out the father and child in Cusk’s book, that critic wrote, would have highlighted “the political issues” of childcare. Such a sentiment might read as, maybe, a more earnest gesture on behalf of the critic to consider what makes a motherhood memoir if not political, then at least politically aware.
But isn’t the mental and psychological assault of motherhood also a political issue? The bleak, foreboding, claustrophobic isolation of motherhood that Cusk captures so well in A Life’s Work have led me to return to the book many times since my first read to study it on the level of craft. Is stirring claustrophobia in a reader—in a book about a frequently claustrophobic state of being—not a sign of great writing?
A more recent review of several books written by women used phrases like “a glorified journal” and “too navel-gazing to inspire the reader.” (The three books reviewed were not motherhood memoirs, though one could fall under that rubric and another is a story of immigration and sexual violation.) A critique of the writing on the sentence level is followed by several beautifully wrought poetic sentences pulled from the book in question. That section of the review, though, abruptly ends after the citation, with the conclusion that memoir should be “instructive” rather than filled with “sleepy musings.”
But why? Have we forgotten that taste and aesthetic judgement are, too, ever in danger of playing into patriarchal thinking? The claim toward universality takes on a new tenor here: memoir should not only reflect the experiences of all humanity, but also wake us up and tell us how to live—like a self-help book—rather than show us what living looks like, or allowing us to witness an artist turning over their subject matter… like a Writer.
As author Sarah McColl wrote in response to that 2019 critique of navel gazing, “When authors write mediocre novels, it doesn't send critics questioning the very legitimacy of the genre.” But memoirists seem always to be put in the position of defending their genre. As Melissa Febos has written, resistance to memoir is always in part a resistance to social justice movements. As Febos says, “I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if the navel, as the locus of all this disdain, has something to do with its connection to birth, and the body, and the female.”
This questioning of the genre’s legitimacy is also often couched in a misogynistic policing of women’s writing. Mother-writers who dare appear as unlikable “bad moms” in their own books, not surprisingly, receive a special dose of animosity and scrutiny from both critics and the reading public for their disturbing self-indulgence. In an interview/review of Jowita Bydlowska’s 2013 Drunk Mom in Globe and Mail, the critic writes that she’s interested in what Bydlowska’s book reveals about “what is private, what should perhaps be kept private, what we need to know, what we don’t, what is insightful or just exhibitionism.”
But it seems that even so, there is a line between private and public that women— even those who dare call themselves Writers— are expected to hold. Because the critic also offers a palpable attitude of disgust toward Bydlowska’s choice to share her story of struggling with addiction while mothering. The rest of the piece is a dressing-down of Bydlowska’s decision to write about this awful period of her life— and of the author’s physical appearance at the interview. If your experience of motherhood looks this messy, the critic may as well have said, it would be better to just shut up about it.
Strangely, that critic spends a good part of the review recounting how she pressed Bydlowska for details about her relationship with her husband, also a writer. The critic gets all huffy when Bydlowska draws her own clear boundaries against centering the interview on what she perceives to be marital gossip, rather than on the book she has written. And so there is also a way in which we continually circle back to this question of what women are expected to withhold, but also divulge, and maybe the question that bubbles underneath any typical answer—how all this will affect the men in these women writers’ lives? Because when it’s not why didn’t you write more about him, then it’s why did you hurt his feelings by writing about him at all.
That review closes with a question lobbed at the author: “Why does she feel compelled to write such excruciatingly personal stories?” And so the tradition of adjudicating the memoirist’s life decisions and situating such an adjudication in some vague outline of what memoir should and, perhaps more importantly, should not do, appears once more. This is the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen to male writers.
This week, I’ve been considering taking on a writing assignment that would implicate, I suppose, some people in my life—writing that feels higher stakes because I am a woman and a mother. But I have also been thinking a lot about how many stories by women we would lose if we understood personal writing this way, as simply a practice of collateral damage, rather than an effort to tell the truth about one’s own experience of the world. It’s a kind of paranoid reading of one’s own work— but also of the genre of personal writing.
Kate Manne writes in Down Girl that misogyny targets women who are “insubordinate, negligent, or out of order” and its primary manifestations are “in punishing bad women’s behavior.” The inability to parse the complex and contradictory terrain of what it means to be both a woman and writer—and how this misogyny influences the way the work is read and discussed—doesn’t just afflict book critics. It’s a much larger cultural failing, and one that is directly tied to our inability to withstand women who step out of line and, in many cases, to our tendency to actively police them.
In general, we collectively lack a nuanced discourse around the affective, psychological, and physical reality of maternal and domestic work (although many thinkers and writers have, in recent years, begun to change this), and most subjects women often write about, because they haven’t been written about enough. We also lack empathy for women who appear fully human. See also some of the criticism surrounding recent narratives of divorce written by women.
The more important point, perhaps, is not what memoir should do or be, but the question of the writer’s role, something I have also been thinking quite a bit about, given the state of things. If memoir is to be conceived of something other than a real-life hero’s journey (a masculine form that really doesn’t reflect the feeling of living in a body that isn’t coded masculine, and therefore where the battle is never fully won), the memoirist’s role, I think, must be to testify to the experience of having a body, and a mind.
Cusk recognized that each body is shaped differently by its movement through the world. Reflecting on how she was “pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion,” Cusk wrote that, “these things do not lie entirely within our own control.” But for her, documenting that lack of control was ultimately a freeing experience: “My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. I freed myself – or them – by trying to be honest, by being willing to apologise.” For many of her readers of her work, the effect was similar.
In 2018, during that swell of mom books, many important essays were critical in a way that sought to expand the genre of memoir, rather than contract and discipline it, including many that pointed out just how many of those books were written by white women. As Angela Garbes wrote in one of those essays, “Books on motherhood by people of color certainly exist, but they are few and far between. Publishers simply don’t buy as many books by mothers of color, and it’s likely that many writers don’t pursue writing about their journeys with pregnancy and motherhood because they don’t believe they’ll be given a chance.”
What we really need is not less of a certain kind of writing about motherhood, or more of some other kind, but more writing about bodies who care for other bodies in all different ways. “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room,” Febos writes.
This essay originally appeared in this newsletter in November 2021. I’ve updated it slightly, as I’ve been thinking about the critical (and interpersonal) reception of personal writing a lot lately. You can read the original version here.
“A mother-writer is always too mother or too writer. She could never feasibly execute both forms of work at the same time …” Ugh. SO GOOD, Amanda!