Gossip as a Literary Genre

THERE’S A PASSAGE in Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir A Life’s Work that angers me every time I read it. Unlike many critics who were furious upon the book’s publication in 2001, I’m not annoyed by its descriptions of motherhood. I admire Cusk’s honesty about the pain and depersonalization entailed by pregnancy and childbirth; I admire it to the extent that it makes me recoil, makes me question whether I’ll ever be able to have a child, to endure the disintegration of individuality, time, and subjectivity distinct from what she terms the “motherbaby.”