I’ve been thinking a lot about Rachel Cusk, specifically her memoir, A Life’s Work, which turned 20 last year. The public reaction to this brilliant account of early motherhood was at the time swift and brutal – and the judgment it received came mostly from other women, writing in newspapers. Reading about it made me nervous to be straying into similar territory.
Having co-written a book in my 20s criticising women’s magazines, I have been bitten by the fangs of public “feminist” discourse before, most notably perhaps by Germaine Greer, whose assertion in her review that “the female breast does not express unless compressed” has also been on my mind, as I leak through yet another three layers of fabric and laugh.
