Rachel Cusk has caused some consternation over her review of Julia Leigh’s book Avalanche, a memoir of Leigh’s attempts to have a child via ART. Some of Cusk’s opinions regarding women “writing about the travails of assisted reproduction” (as I sometimes do) have offended my sensibilities, perhaps for uncommon reasons.
Cusk compares infertile women to second-rate creative writing students who spend “all their money and time on what would in the end prove a fruitless ambition”. The problem with this, she suggests, is that these perversely obstinate students and infertile women hopelessly romanticize the state of being a writer or a mother – if you switch the words in her so-called “half-analogy”, it would read like this:
“…they had started to idealize “being a mother,” to detach it from what motherhood really was or ever could be.”
Cusk then says that women writing about ART are “putting into reverse the evolving contemporary discourse around motherhood. This woman doesn’t — can’t — fear what having a child will mean for her hard-won social and intellectual autonomy; she isn’t concerned with the right to express ambivalence toward this oldest and strongest of binds — indeed, she perhaps views maternal ambivalence as a somewhat grotesque luxury.”
In calling us retrograde and anti-feminist she dismisses in one fell swoop the months I spent agonising over whether babies and motherhood – about which I had always harboured an uneasy ambivalence – were actually worth going through IVF for.
We are complex beings, Cusk, and cannot be lumped together under one unnuanced, unsubtle generalisation.
According to Cusk, the woman writing about the travails of assisted reproduction is:
“…unambivalent: she wants desperately, blindly, to become a mother, and while IVF certainly offers some hope that her desire might be fulfilled, it can also feed that desire, feed it until it is rendered all-consuming and capable of exacting every mental, physical and financial cost.”
Not so for every woman who does IVF. I don’t intend to belittle the experience of infertile women who desperately want children, and I agree that the IVF industry peddles hope on a criminal scale, preying on women who do experience a more visceral desire to have children.
But just as fertile women of child-bearing age have serious fears and misgivings about motherhood (yet go on to have babies), so too do infertile women, rendering the whole enterprise of embarking on ART twice as agonising and even more prone to painful over-thinking about the realities of parenting.
Or was that just me?
Is that possible?
Find other responses to Cusk’s piece as well as reviews of Julia Leigh’s book here on Silent Sorority.
hmm. so much to say on all of this. firstly on the’ evolving contemporary discourse around motherhood’ – i think motherhood is still fetishised to an obscene amount in the media and wider society. She seems to think women undergoing IVF also undergo a lobotomy at the same time – i would imagine they are well aware of the realities of motherhood, making their journey towards it all the more complex. Finally – for now – I think your take on the IVF industry peddling hope on a criminal scale is very interesting…had not considered before. thank you for sharing.
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So pompous and condescending – basically saying that anyone who says they did ART because they really want a child is dragging feminism back years. And yes, with all the fetishising going on, who can criticise women doing ART anyway?
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Undoubtedly. What, with you being a humanoid and all. These binary categories just aren’t workable. Investing in ART can surely be filtered through ambivalence (and the umpteen reasons unpinning that), just as having children does not strip all parents of ambivalence about being a parent. In the case of the latter, it’s why I don’t gravitate towards the majority of parent blogs. If we’re not having spectators telling us how we feel, we’re telling each other what it is we all feel. Apparently. It only makes me queasy. It’s Friday. Sentence construction clearly under construction, but you probably get my point. I just found the half-analogy grindingly irritating.
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Absolutely – I don’t think I know any parents who weren’t fearfully ambivalent at some stage
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Does anyone know if Rachel has kids?
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Hiya, she does…. She wrote a controversial book about motherhood, “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” after her first daughter was born (she has two children) about how exhausting, grinding and dreary raising kids is…..
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Oh so she’s one of those. The last person who would know anything about infertility.
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Great points! (especially the last few paragraphs) I have not read any of Cusk’s stuff but my understanding was that she has written extensively about maternal ambivalence. I had a certain amount of ambivalence myself about motherhood, whether I would be a good mother, whether all the treatments would be worth it in the end, etc. — but I think most parents do. Perhaps a famously ambivalent mother was not the best choice to write about someone who had a burning desire to achieve motherhood? I mean, I suppose it sounds good on paper to set up that dichotomy, but…!
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True! She probably wasn’t the best choice for a review of this particular book…
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Okay, I totally have been mulling on this post. I finally read Rachel Cusk’s review over on Loribeth’s post, and it filled me with fury. I hate overgeneralizing. I hate this idea that you can lump all infertile women together, and this idea that someone who doesn’t share this experience could so easily dismiss the experience without even attempting the slightest bit of empathy makes me boil. I can tell you personally that when people tell me, “Oh just wait until you have kids…(insert comment about money or free time or any given ‘those days are over’ sentiment” I want to stick a fork in their eye. None of these people have ever had to go through the medical rigamarole or even just the realization that HAVING KIDS HAS BECOME A CHALLENGING QUEST, and that the pain of fighting to have a child when it’s far from easy doesn’t mean that you don’t understand that actual parenthood will be mundane or exhausting or downright awful at times. But when you’re not there yet and you really want to be? Those kinds of comments are horrid. And I feel like Rachel made a giant comment like that. No one, not infertile or fertile people, looks at parenthood through realistic eyes when first setting out. Argh.
I also agree with you on the hope peddling, made easier when IVF works for people but pushed all the more for those that it doesn’t. I felt always one follicle away from success, and now I know that probably wasn’t ever going to happen. I fall under the “desperately wanting children” category, at least in the beginning. It wasn’t blind and as it got harder the desperation was tempered with the acceptance that this was going to be way harder than I thought, and maybe might not come to pass. But I feel just so insulted by Rachel Cusk’s suppositions. And to call infertile women anti-feminist? YARGH! Like all feminists don’t have children by choice. Why is it once something is not by choice, once you have to fight for it or accept what is, all of a sudden you’re an antiquated wanna-be-housewife? So unfair. Sorry for the super long comment. Her review made me super mad and I appreciated your questions and thoughtful analysis of what she said and how it could be perceived.
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Hi Jess thanks for your comment no need to apologise I loved it! Yes, I felt Cusk was saying that anyone ‘desperate’ enough to be doing IVF is more or less an idiot, blinded to the day-to-day realities of parenting. And she implies that by actually making the official statement that you really want children – i.e. by signing up for fertility treatment – you are different from women who do the same thing by just having sex. I mean, plenty of women very much want kids, have sex once or twice and then go on to give birth – but a woman is dragging back feminism if she has to undergo several IVFs to get exactly the same result (if successful)?? Not fair.
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Late to the discussion here, but I’ve added your post to our blog book tour! http://blog.silentsorority.com/not-going-sugar-coat-failed-ivf-grief-real/
Thanks for contributing to this important conversation xo
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Weeks later and my blood pressure still goes up when thinking about Cusk’s review….. Part of me never wishes the pain of infertility on another human being, but another small part of me wishes that some people (especially people like her) would experience infertility for a little bit, just so they can peer into the abyss of hell for a bit.
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Yeah it was truly awful. No understanding whatsoever.
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urgh, her review is so unsympathetic and horrible! There is nothing unfeminist about the desire to have children and pursue hat. Women going through ART are also torn between when to accept it’s time to stop and hoping the next round might work. And of course all the people who tell you “never give up”, plus the doctors selling hope. She should be more critical of the whole IVF industry and not the poor people having to go through it!
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Ambivalence is intelligence and compassion in action. It does not mean “no”, nor does it mean one is a bad feminist if you then go ahead to try and have children with the help of fertility clinics. Yes, those of us infertiles KNOW that parenting is hard – we can’t bloody avoid that fact with the endless mummyblogs and parenting articles! I really admired Rachel Cusk’s book and quote it in mine but her lazy, incoherent and inarticulate use of Julia Leigh’s book was spiteful. Childlessness is part of the unfinished businesses of feminism and deserved a better analysis that she had the wit to pull together it would seem. Maybe her mummy brain made her all tiredy-tired?! Ugh. Thanks so much for your analysis, really helpful! Jody x
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Thanks Jody; it did indeed seem to have a vein of spite running through it. She had children, right? So how is she so different to someone trying but failing to have a baby? Whether she professes to hate the drudgery or not, she still at some point made the decision to try to conceive. So supercilious to presume that only she had the wit to experience ambivalence.
But yes, I am quite interested in reading her book on motherhood…
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Interesting points at the end regarding ambivalence and infertility. I too possessed a level myself, was ambivalent about having children until the age of about 35, and when we started TTC my then naive self didn’t know how hard I’d be wiling to try if it didn’t happen easily. If you’d have told me then that answer was 4 years, one surgery, 5 IUI’s, 5 IVF’s and tens of thousands spent, I’d have laughed you off the face of earth.
Cusk claims something to the effect that before people have babies, they know nothing at all, I’d say the same goes for people who have never had to work to conceive them.
Her assumption that those of us who wanted children badly haven’t considered the un-glamorous grind of parenthood is so ridiculous, isn’t it? Plus, I’ve noticed that those who do have children via ART more often than not do not complain about parenthood any where near at the level of those who didn’t have to work for it.
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