Three Women, Part 1

Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk, Patricia Lockwood

Fernand Léger Three Women

The aspect of autofiction — whether writing in memoir or novel — that unites these writers is the central figure of the writer, the woman whose vocation is first as a writer and secondarily in relation to others as a wife, mother, daughter.

There’s a kind of nakedness or spareness to their style, one that cuts against the grain of surface lives, revealing a rawness, a messiness if not a chaos of domesticity beneath. This subject, of the often alienating domestic sphere their characters find themselves thrust in, unites these writers. Equally significant is the way the cultural milieu surrounding and often directing these domestic issues manifests itself in the lives of these characters.

All three of these writers’ styles are, of course, distinctly their own and it is their stylistic way of writing that is unlike anything else being written today. In other words, each of these writers worked their style to hone it to its unique voice. In this regard they are unlike each other though comparisons can be seen in other areas that they each choose to write about.

Women — to generalize bluntly — are heir to the domestic in ways men, traditionally, have never mastered, or have shunned outright. The imbalance of the domestic sphere pitted against their professional lives (in these instances as writers) has the power to drain the lives of women characters in these stories of all vitality while at the same time revealing their strength and resources in their response to the demands of this domain.

This aspect of domesticity is revealed relationally, through husbands, children, mothers, and friends which all have to be managed and taken on by the women in these narratives. It is as though their worlds are held together and rise or fall by their ability to love and care about the lives that have been thrust upon them to manage. They occupy a gravitational pull at the center of their lives as they are presented.

One of the dangers of modern living is the manner in which we have naturalized the many stages of life — love, marriage, childbirth, age — as though the way these are enacted and the expectations attached to them were universal givens. We are often blind to the cultural contexts in which they occur and have their provenance.

As a result, to buck the trend of such seeming inevitability invites criticism. When Rachel Cusk questions the role of motherhood as in any way acceptable in her memoir A Life’s Work and finds it catastrophic on many levels, she opens herself to scorn for the honesty of her experience and her refusal to abide by the bromides offered by others, despite the cost to her sense of self.

My appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed, perhaps squandered. Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting my escape from it…

In Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, married life holds a rueful reflection of the narrator in self-deprecating humor that barely conceals the failures they felt compelled to be revealed by the comparison:

He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid. He’s from Ohio. This means he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim. Nor does he keep a list of those who infuriate him on a given day. People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich. You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

So much of what these writers write about is what it’s like to be a woman and a spouse, a mother, and have life thrown at you while you’re contending with trying to be a writer. That becomes the subject, in one way or another, of every book under discussion here by these authors.

It is a voice struggling to articulate the demands of writing in the face of what women are expected to endure, take on, become. They’re writers! They’re writers first, but they’re also girlfriends, then wives, then divorcees or scorned spouses, then single parents.

Instead of epic narratives of urgent significance, mundane realities often crowd these stories that have their own lunatic exigency.

Even as these works are often fictional, there is an almost automatic tendency for readers to identify the voice of the narrator (whether written in the first or third person) as the writer herself.

Each of these authors has a unique relation to feminism, to being women in the worlds they find themselves living in and the lives they are living through, often cutting against the grain of the cultural inheritance of feminism (however assumed) where this relation is often directly addressed.

Men, in the lives of their characters, are often drawn as absurd, weak, or ineffectual. If a man possesses any virtue, it lives outside the reality that is being experienced by women, as exceptional to the lives of other characters.

Mother-daughter relationships factor significantly with these authors. This goes for generational aspects of these stories as well. Families factor significantly as storyline structures as does motherhood. Lockwood’s mother is a fully drawn person who drives a good deal of the narrative despite the book’s title, Priestdaddy. The mother in is figured critically Cusk’s memoirs. There is less central a role for Offill’s mothers although her own motherhood is often central to her novels.

Siblings also have roles of varying significance, most notably in Offill’s Weather and Lockwood’s Priestdaddy.

Motherhood itself for Offill and for Cusk was an invasive project, documented from inception by Cusk and throughout infancy by both authors. It figures in the most overwhelmingly catastrophic sense in Lockwood’s older sister’s childbirth in Priestdaddy.

This is all to say that the lives lived in these authors’ stories are largely told in relational terms. Relationships are nearly always at the center of these narratives. Plotlines are more often than not diffuse. The women at the center of these narratives have an acute awareness and sensitivity to the relational world around them and read it through a lens of heightened intelligence and nuance.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the main characters in these stories are more often than not writers, sometimes, as in Patricia Lockwood’s books, identified with the author herself. Writing is, in many ways, quite literally a means of survival for these writers.

The final aspect these narratives share is one of sanity and its porous borders on a shifting landscape, of negotiating the temperaments of others in a world that is often depicted as frayed and broken.

All three authors acknowledge their neurosis in one way or another and their stories map their reaction to surviving in a neurotic world and environment. That is, in the peculiar neurosis of marriage and families (we’re looking at you, Dr. Freud) and the neurosis peculiar to marriage and families.

The preservation of sanity, of holding to a moral center that is always shifting, becomes an urgent matter for a variety of circumstances across these authors’ books. These stories beg the question: why are women left holding the moral center of these other lives?

All of the books under discussion deal with particular periods in the lives of these authors. The concerns of these periods are animated by both public and private issues and how these two spheres interconnect. Politics, the environment, gender, religion, families, marriage, relationships, technology all figure into these narratives in one form or another and are connected to certain episodes in the lives of their characters.