A Life's Work

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My previous film, Tango Octogenario, took a long, circuitous and bizarre route to the eyes of a programmer for New Directors/New Films, the showcase put on by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

When I was nine I was told that medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to construct, that their architects would not see them completed, that generations of stonemasons would work on them. 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. This latter is particularly valuable to Cusk, showing her that, to Coleridge at least: “Parenthood is redemptive, transformative, creative. Today, a woman in a Range Rover pulled up at a junction where we had stopped, and rolled down her window.As she interviews babysitters, Cusk finds herself giving unnecessarily detailed instructions and realizes that she is trying to explain “what it was like to be me.

I started a blog in 2009 which now has more than 500 posts related to the film and filmmaking, as well as the fields related to those in the documentary. Every single day, some woman with her child strapped into the front seat of her car shakes her head at us.Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet while also preserving, and nurturing, the natural environment; and Jeff Stein, AIA, Soleri’s mentee at Arcosanti in the 1970s and his successor after his death in 2013. 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. When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women. 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? Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry.

DL:Paolo Soleri was the first to agree to be in the film, and the first interview was with him, and the first footage was of Arcosanti. Every morning I cycle with my daughters to school: it is a good 10-minute ride, uphill most of the way.

Alongside her personal narrative, Cusk offers reflections on the experience of motherhood more broadly, drawing on literary depictions of parenthood. 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. My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again. The reproduction, modification, distribution, or re-publication of the content (including RSS feeds) without prior permission is strictly prohibited.