The Death and Birth of Subjectivity in Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

Rachel Cusk is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated and adventurous writers working in the West today. The author of twelve novels, as well as many other kinds of texts, she is known for her writerly experimentation. This paper discusses A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), which is usually confidently categorised as non-fiction, memoir or autobiography, but this classification is problematised here, and it is shown that there are elements at work in it which elevate it above the autobiographical and pull it towards the autofictional. In the course of demonstrating this, the genre of autofiction itself is briefly delineated vis-à-vis the autobiographical. A Life’s Work stages the vicissitudes of female, and specifically maternal, subjectivity, which raises the interesting philosophical questions: what does it mean to turn from a woman into a mother, what is the societal space allotted to women, and how are women positioned in society? This essay draws on the work of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault to shed light on key aspects of Cusk’s text which arguably have remained underappreciated hitherto.