A Life's Work

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Sooner or later, you end up in family therapy, because it has never occurred to you that it might be an idea to simply bring children up to be happy, or to consider happiness as an option for yourself . A lover of literature, she wants to turn to the classics for guidance, but she realizes that she has never paid much attention to literary descriptions of parenthood, instead skimming them, feeling that they were not relevant to her. However, Cusk does find literary parents, in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Frost At Midnight. Andy’s enthusiasm for and positivity in the project sustained me and gave me the confidence to keep going, even after we finished production, maybe especially after production. There was me, my husband, my husband's eight-year-old daughter, and our own two children: a baby who cried passionately each time I moved out of her line of vision, and her sister, older by 15 months, whose abundant hair exactly matched the electrifying palette of autumn in the pleasure gardens that year.

When the baby begins to sleep more and Cusk finds a few hours to be her “old self” again, she feels guilty, comparing herself to an adulterous spouse.It narrates Cusk’s experience of motherhood, covering the first six months of her first-born daughter’s life.

The memoir proved a breakthrough for Cusk, leading her toward the autobiographical fiction for which she is now best known.At other times, finding she misses her daughter while she is sleeping, she lies down beside her cradle. It was a beautiful place in the Brendon Hills in Somerset, the rattling ghost of a grand estate, where a miniature ornamental lake still languished in the overgrown pleasure gardens, and the trees in the neglected orchard shed rare red, heart-shaped apples like the apples in a medieval tapestry. Today, a woman in a Range Rover pulled up at a junction where we had stopped, and rolled down her window. 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. David Licata (DL):I became excited by the idea in 2004, Wolfgang and I began shooting in 2005, Andy and I shot the final interview in 2017.

There is a robust Facebook page dedicated to the film and my personal Instagram account, which has some film-related posts.This hunger evidently goes unsatisfied, and must content itself with scraps from the table of daily news.

I was forced to communicate deeply and personally with so many people, and so many different kinds of people–academics, farmers, geneticists, astronomers, architects, city planners, record collectors, DJs, antiquities experts, students, ministers, singers, to name a few. Even when she is not breastfeeding, every moment of her life is accounted for: there are no “lubricant empty hours” in which she can reflect, regroup, and feel herself again. I had been asked many times - am still asked - by journalists barely able to contain their excitement lest I say "yes", whether I regretted having my children.She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag, undetected. In motherhood the communal was permitted to prevail over the individual, and the result, to my mind, was a great deal of dishonesty.