In 2001, Rachel Cusk raised the subject of motherhood to new literary heights—and became a beacon to moms everywhere—with A Life's Work, her lyrical yet fiercely honest memoir about her tough first year as a parent. Now the British author is focusing on her family once more, this time through the lens of travel. In her new book, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (Faber and Faber), Cusk describes how she and her two young daughters were transformed by three months of exploring the country's art and culture. Here, she offers a list of five books that have influenced her as a chronicler of domestic life and as a parent.
Flambards
by K. M. Peyton (Oxford Children's Modern Classics)
"I grew up in Los Angeles until I was 8, when my family moved back to England, so I was very aware of the difference between the two cultures. Whereas American writers such as Laura Ingalls Wilder write about struggling against various obstacles together as a family, British literature is all about the adventures children have while their parents are off traveling or dead. Flambards is just this sort of book. In it, Christina, an orphaned girl, goes to live with her cousins in their grand estate, Flambards. Because she is an English heroine, she's feisty and independent, and eventually she becomes the mistress of Flambards. Peyton is one of those writers whose appropriateness for children exists in her clarity of expression. Adults get drunk and they swear, but her clear language allows the child to enter this reality. This makes the book fantastic to read as a child and to read to children as an adult. When I read it to my own daughters, who are 6 and 7, I got so carried away that I kept going even after they had fallen asleep, tears falling down my cheeks."
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë (Vintage Classics)
"I must have been 13 when I first read this novel, which is about the female struggle for dignity and independence. Indeed, I view it as a female rite of passage to which I will subject my own daughters! Jane eventually marries, but she takes an original route to her position as wife and, though she loses the fantasy man—the Rochester she was in love with as a younger woman is dead to her by the end—she finds a more genuine existence. I never tire of its journeys through the female psyche, and it amuses me that the character with whom I sympathized the least as a child—Bertha, the madwoman in the attic—is now the one, though it chills me to admit it, I identify with the most."
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
"This book is closely autobiographical; it describes Woolf's childhood and the traditional roles of her parents. I think she was deeply ambivalent about Mrs. Ramsay, the character based on her own mother, and what she represents—the angel of the house, creating grandeur out of self-sacrifice. To me, Mrs. Ramsay is the very opposite of my domestic ability, the patron saint of everything I am not. I think many mothers now have mixed feelings about that image—of the woman whose purpose is to create a lovely home—half wanting it and half terrified of it. To the Lighthouse gives an amazingly detailed description of the female terrain, with all its possibilities and limitations, as true now as it was then."
The Age of Grief
by Jane Smiley (Anchor)
"After reading this book, I handed it to my husband and said, 'This is our life.' We're not dentists, we're not living a suburban American life, and hopefully one of us is not having an affair with someone from the local amateur opera group. But the way Smiley writes about the task of parenthood is so true to the modern world. There are many books out there about mothers and fathers living separate lives and the tensions of that setup. This novella, however, is about the perils of equality. The couple in the book do the same job and run an office together. Basically what Smiley is saying is that they are so much the same that it's difficult for them to express sexuality in their lives. She also makes a moral point that family life is beyond individuality. The husband doesn't feel about his wife the way he did before her indiscretion, but he welcomes her back. The losses and sadness are borne for the sake of the family. I thought that was a very clear setting-out of the difficulties and the rewards of marriage and parenting."
Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence (Modern Library)
"This is a fictional portrait of Lawrence's own upbringing, particularly of his mother and her realization that all her modest intellectual
hopes were being sunk in her drunken husband. The only way she was going to find fulfillment was through her two children. It is an intense exploration of a dysfunctional love between a mother and her sons. Lawrence is the great egalitarian: The mother is just as full a person as the son who observes her. It's easy to forget, in a family relationship—especially one in which a parent is troubled—that everyone is real. I think Lawrence's gift is the ability to see these relationships as very alive. He is the author who has encouraged me most to write about domestic life; he writes with such intellectual force about the transformation of body and mind that accompanies becoming a parent."
