In 2001 we were living in the sticks. It was a beautiful place in the Brendon Hills in Somerset, the rattling ghost of a grand estate, where a miniature ornamental lake still languished in the overgrown pleasure gardens, and the trees in the neglected orchard shed rare red, heart-shaped apples like the apples in a medieval tapestry. It lay remotely, far from town, in a lush green crease of hills that rose steadily up to meet the moor. There was me, my husband, my husband's eight-year-old daughter, and our own two children: a baby who cried passionately each time I moved out of her line of vision, and her sister, older by 15 months, whose abundant hair exactly matched the electrifying palette of autumn in the pleasure gardens that year.
We were renting a house in the grounds of the estate, abandoned by its lineage in the 1940s. It had the portrait of a lady at the top of the stairs with particularly penetrating eyes. I was a little frightened of the house at first: those eyes followed me doggedly, and at night, when the darkness was fathomless, the house embarked on long interior monologues, the water groaning
in its old pipes, the floorboards clicking and creaking, the damp walls sometimes emitting a profound shudder or sigh, while outside the wind roared in the oak trees and over the black shapes of hills. There were other houses on the estate besides ours: a cottage, and a flat in the tumbledown stable block opposite our house, and a recherche dwelling called the Elephant House. The people who lived in these places were mostly artisans and artists. They were welcoming and warm, for in this community people came and went frequently. It was easy for us to fit in.
All through a drizzling Exmoor winter I had been writing a book, in a tiny rented place up on the moor where we stayed while we looked for somewhere to live. My husband walked the baby around the lanes in her pram so that I could concentrate. It rained and blew a gale. It would have been more pleasant for them inside: the imposition was so direct that I wrote as quickly as I could. I had written other parts of the book in some uncomfortable places: the cold cobwebbed vestry of my parents'-in-law's local church, to which my mother-in-law had the key; the attic of another, earlier house whose stairs were so narrow for my increasingly pregnant body that it seemed possible I might one day get permanently stuck up there. By the time we moved to the house beside the pleasure gardens, which had a study, I was nearly finished.
Adversity was the hallmark of this book, though I didn't notice it at the time. It was a book - called A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, and published in 2001 - that set out to describe the psychical events of childbirth and early motherhood, and though I very much wanted to write it, it was difficult to do when in the thrall of the events themselves. But that was how it had to be, for I was using myself as the template. I had to live it and to analyse it, both at the same time. I was four or five months pregnant with my second child when I began, and when I reached the end, that child existed, an ardent 10-month-old baby whose power of love has ever since been fused in my mind with the risks and rewards of self-exposure. By the time the book came out, she was one and a half, her sister three: that summer I peacefully harvested the gooseberry bushes at the back of the house, swam in the ornamental lake, shooed out the bats that sometimes flew around the rafters of our room on summer evenings. It was my sincere belief that nobody would read it or care about it, and in all honesty I didn't blame them. I didn't particularly want anyone to read it. It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again.
First of all there was a letter, from a writer friend I had sent a copy to. Be prepared, she said: your book is going to make people very angry.
I read this sitting in the foot-high summer grass that grew through the terrace, above a wild sea of rhododendron bushes. I didn't know what to make of it. Which people? Why would they be angry? What did it have to do with them? A day or two later my sister called. Don't listen to anything they say, she said. It's a very good book. Just ignore them.
These signs and portents soon crystallised into something tangible. I went into town and bought a newspaper, and turning the pages came across the first review of A Life's Work.
"If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame." The reviewer was a woman. I had met her, in fact, at some literary festival or other years before. She had seemed harmless enough: I would not have suspected her of such drastic reach, such annihilating middle-class smugness ("which would be a shame"). She went on to accuse me of "confining [my daughter] to the kitchen like an animal". Perhaps strangely, it was the second remark that troubled me more than the possibility that humanity would be extinguished by my hand. How did this person presume to know what I did with my daughter, and where? Where had she come upon such bizarre information? Had someone told her I treated my child like an animal? It took me a long time to realise that her accusation came from the book itself, from a falsification of its personal material. She had searched it, I saw, for "evidence" of my conduct as a mother, and as such she could permit herself to misrepresent me, for she was not judging the book as a book. She was judging it as a social situation.
I returned to the house. When I laid eyes on my children I was instantly overcome by powerful feelings of guilt and shame. There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze. This time, however, I felt it not as a writer but as a mother. I felt that I had committed a violent act. I felt that I had been abusive and negligent. I felt these things not because of anything I had physically or actually done to them ("she confines her daughter to the kitchen like an animal"), but because I had written a book that had malfunctioned, and had allowed our relationship to be publicly impugned. I see now that it was the reviewer who was violent, with her careless, self-congratulatory brutality ("Believe it or not, quite a few people enjoy motherhood," she went on, "but in order to do so, it is important to grow up first"); the reviewer who, while claiming saintly qualities of motherhood, proved with these lines her utter lack of respect and care for children.
Another review, in a different paper: this one long and articulate where the first was brief and blunt.
"What is really startling about A Life's Work is that it is genuinely post-feminist, not in the sense that we do not need feminism any more, but in the sense that it implicitly points to the holes in the familiar feminist discourse. If we do away with the notion that the personal is political, as feminism-lite is wont to do, who gets left holding the baby? This is the contemporary crisis of feminism. An equality founded on what Cusk might call public significance has produced an emphasis on work as the only measure of parity. Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life. Between these worlds, Cusk has crafted a work of beauty and wisdom. And belly laughs. A lovely thing."
The sun shines again: the shame goes away. After all, it seems that I have done something good, not bad. I even feel a certain pride, as a mother, that is. My writer-self feels nothing at all. It can't afford to.
"Frankly, you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children. And everything those children say or do is - in your mind - really about you. Sooner or later, you end up in family therapy, because it has never occurred to you that it might be an idea to simply bring children up to be happy, or to consider happiness as an option for yourself ... Talk about navel-gazing."
"Cusk anatomises motherhood as Montaigne anatomised friendship or Robert Burton anatomised melancholy ... Some alchemy of her prose renders this most fascinating and boring of all subjects graceful, eloquent, modest and true."
"I have about as much interest in babies as I have in cavity-wall insulation. You might feel moved to describe the moments of desperation that follow nine hours of incessant wailing.
It might not occur to you that, just because it's a horrific experience doesn't make it interesting. If you had a baby, you did so because you wanted one. If you are suffering sleep deprivation so severe you're hallucinating, that was your choice."
"I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition."
"Pure misery to read. From the way she writes about her first child, God alone only knows how she allowed herself to bear a second."
On and on it went, back and forth: I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual. One curious article questioned the length of my sentences: how had I, a mother, been able to write such long and complicated sentences? Why was I not busier, more tired? Another reviewer - a writer! - commanded her readers not to let the book fall into the hands of pregnant women. The telephone rang and rang. I was invited on the Today programme to defend myself. I was invited on the Nicky Campbell programme to defend myself. I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next. This time, it was different. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced. Yet I had experienced it, in a way: it was part of what I had found intolerable in the public culture of motherhood, the childcare manuals and the toddler groups, the discourse of domestic life, even the politics of birth itself. In motherhood the communal was permitted to prevail over the individual, and the result, to my mind, was a great deal of dishonesty. I had identified this dishonesty in A Life's Work: it seemed to me to be intrinsic to the psychical predicament of the new mother, that in having a child she should re-encounter the childhood mechanism of suppression. She would encounter the possibility of suppressing her true feelings in order to be "good" and to gain approval. My own struggle had been to resist this mechanism. I wanted to - I had to - remain "myself".
It was, perhaps, our isolation - idyllic though it was - that sealed these events in a profound melancholy from which I subsequently found myself unable to escape. The world became a bleaker place. I felt angry and defensive and violated. Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work. I had been asked many times - am still asked - by journalists barely able to contain their excitement lest I say "yes", whether I regretted having my children. What meaning could such an admission possibly have? My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves. It is these kinds of questions that are the true heresy, not my refusal to answer them. But my books are my own, to approve of or regret as I see fit.
These days I have a better understanding of the intolerance to which, for a while, I fell victim. I see that, like all intolerance, it arose from dependence on an ideal. I see that cruelty and rudeness and viciousness are its harbingers, as they have always been. I see that many - most - of my female detractors continue to write routinely in the press about motherhood and issues relating to children. Their interest in these issues has a fixated quality, compared with their worldly male equivalents. I am struck by this distinction, for it is clear that they hunger to express themselves not as women, not as commentators or intellectuals, but as mothers. This hunger evidently goes unsatisfied, and must content itself with scraps from the table of daily news.
I see, too, that there are many women who find motherhood easier than I do, or did. I believe that these things do not lie entirely within our own control. I felt a great need to write, which did not always harmonise with the requirements of my daughters. I was step-parent to a young child with difficulties and vulnerabilities of her own. I have a bad relationship with my own mother and was pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion. But this, too, is a common enough reality: why should it be mocked or censured? Penelope Leach gives, I think, an accurate definition of postnatal depression: she says that in postnatal depression the mother believes that there is something faulty or abnormally difficult about her child. This was not my position. My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. I freed myself - or them - by trying to be honest, by being willing to apologise.
Nevertheless, I remain uneasy in the public places of motherhood - the school gate, the coffee circuit - where the skies can unexpectedly open and judgment rain down on one's head. I find that I like women less than I did, and wonder whether other feminists have been in the same uncomfortable position. It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. It isn't any more.
Every morning I cycle with my daughters to school: it is a good 10-minute ride, uphill most of the way. We used to go on the pavement, but people protested so now we go on the road. Every single day, some woman with her child strapped into the front seat of her car shakes her head at us. Today, a woman in a Range Rover pulled up at a junction where we had stopped, and rolled down her window. "You're making me very nervous," she said to me loudly. I looked at her, at the child sitting beside her. Did she not care that my daughters could hear what she said? Did they not exist for her, panting and proud of their cycling, stridently moral about pollution? Could she not see that it was she, in her car, that represented the very danger she congratulated herself for pointing out? She was so certain that she was protecting her child better than I was protecting mine. I will never defeat that certainty. All I can do is endeavour not to be crushed by it.
I smiled politely, and we rode on.
· A new edition of A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk is published this month by Faber & Faber (rrp £8.99).To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875