Motherload

I was supporting a colleague yesterday to run a training session on how to speak persuasively. I love this work, it's always so interesting to be with a group who are being asked to focus on a specific aspect of psychological and interpersonal functioning. As the session beds in, pre-emptive intellectual defences are gradually eased away, and an intense, very intimate focus on feelings takes its place. What I love about this is that it's an opportunity to think about feeling , which is a deeply difficult thing to do, because it entails the attempt to see one's self clearly, a near impossible task. We are like cats, trying to work out what that long flippy appendage behind us is, yet unable to recognize that it's part of us. Frustration is an emotional response to a perceived impediment . Our English word for it comes straight from medieval Latin, frustrare, disappoint .  The feeling of frustration can be connected to further emotional reactions, notably anger a...

I'm delighted that Professor Beard is so constantly herself, or perhaps her selves , in all her fantastic intellectual variety. I'm thrilled that she is a role model for other women. Bearding Mary  might have seemed funny at first, but the trolling that has been aimed at her is, as she puts it herself, truly 'vile'.  Thank you, Professor, for not  spending time plastering yourself in makeup. For not wasting hours of your uniquely multiple public intellectual's life in salons. How would you get everything done? Thank you for spending your time... professing instead, which is what you're paid to do. Thank you for being intelligent, for having common sense, and for having the intellectual humility to know what you know, and listen when you don't. What you do encourages other women to do the same. Thank you for wearing, doing, saying and thinking as you please, in conversation with others. Your freedom to do this, and your openness, is one of the signs t...

I turned down an offer to write a Proust biography in 2006. I didn't want to write on the writer, having spent several years drowning in his book while I swam my way through a doctorate. Why so snotty about biography? I had been indoctrinated as an undergraduate with the idea of focusing exclusively on reading text — privileging close reading to the exclusion of history, whether personal or contextual. In fact I was taught to despise history and biography as being unworthy of study in their own right, in order to bring the study of language further into the light. This was the late 1980s, the heyday of critical theory. It was assumed, firstly, that I would just know historical and biographical facts, and secondly, that they were of a lower order of knowledge than interpretations  of the text. There was such a debate about the valency, credibility and construction of historical perspective, that I was able to wriggle through university history-free. It shocked my history-lov...

So I come from the generation that grew up knowing they were supposed to have self-esteem. Work on it, build it, have it respected by others, etc etc. The term is such an embedded cliche it seems to hold little power any more. When Gok Wan does his thing, he is wholly focused on enabling women to reevaluate their self-esteem, and encouraging them to believe that they are 'worth it'. It seems so cheesy, so easy to laugh at. So I looked up 'self-esteem' on Wikipedia. Self-esteem, apparently, is an evaluation of one's own worth. Only under conditions of capitalism could psychology be commodified in this way, it seems to me. That it took Carl Rogers to invent the notion of 'unconditional regard', that we needed to be told or sold the idea that we ought really to be nice to each other, speaks volumes about the appropriation of essential humanity by its own false representations of itself. Self-esteem is a mixture of a JUDGEMENT we perform upon our own com...

I am embarrassed by my freedom at the moment. Be careful what you wish for. I have spent the last six years experimenting with different modes of mothering, different employment directions, different approaches to writing, in a sometimes exhausting, sometimes exhilarating attempt to deal with my Motherload. In that time I have dealt with immigration, housing, education, health, psychology, economics, employment, unemployment, transferable skills, and some other stuff I can't remember now. That was just at home. Now my son is six, my daughter nine. They go to school. I tutor. My (school) day is my own. By comparison with previous years where I was either a full-time worker or carer, this is unimaginable, golden freedom. I am almost looking for sources of stress, so addicted am I to the need to be needed, so ready for the endless volleys of comment and criticism that come at mothers from all directions. Now I am ready to write. I am ashamed that I was unable to write my way t...

A few years ago, Perry Anderson wrote a brilliant piece on French miserablism. The French national stereotype is an indifferent shrug of the shoulders: it's cool not to care. Anderson's point was that the powerful French tradition of staging a conflict between passion and cynicism, most obviously in the nineteenth century as Romanticism slowly gave way to Realism (echoing the movement from revolution to restoration to republicanism), has turned really sour. Because the French civic ideal is social justice for all, it has a massive national debt. The state benefits infrastructure is cripplingly expensive, and will not survive the European recession intact. The outpouring of anger and proto-rebellion has been steady for several years now, as workers' rights are curtailed in favour of the employer, and long hard looks are taken at healthcare subsidy. This generalised economic gloom in the face of austerity has been coming out in French literature and film for some time. ...

I took my nine-year-old daughter to see the film adaptation of Les Mis last weekend. I was slightly nervous about what she'd make of it: the story is, after all, one of grinding poverty, the descent into prostitution of well-meaning women, breaking parole and living as a fugitive, obsessive pursuit, despair and failed revolutions. I mean, I don't let her watch Eastenders , so why would I allow her to see Fantine have no other option but to sell herself to feed Cosette? In my mind, the justification is that she's got an appetite for storytelling, and knows the difference between fact and fiction. I want to share stories with her that I have found moving, effective, compelling in the past -- although there's always a bit of an issue if I try to ram something I know to be canonical down her throat: she can sniff out my mauvaise foi a mile off. But I feel it's important and right to be experimental. We could always leave, I reasoned, if she was really upset by it....

On Saturday night I was at the Donmar, sitting on the world's slackest grey plastic chair, transfixed by the sight of Harriet Walter playing Brutus in an all-female production of Julius Caesar , directed by Phyllida Lloyd, late of Iron Lady and Mamma Mia film fame. I've seen Edward Hall's all-male Shakespeare productions, and I seem to recall an all-male bard's production of Twelfth Night from Cheek by Jowl, starring Adrian Lester, in Paris a few years back. Very transgressive, to go back to the theatrical rules of the 16th and 17th century, and have boys playing girls. Very . I have never seen an all-woman cast playing anything since I cast myself to play Macbeth in the lower sixth, shuddering and squealing manfully as Banquo staggered onto the stage. I've certainly never seen an all-woman cast do a production of a resolutely macho, sickeningly violent Shakespeare play like Julius Caesar . Now, I don't get out as much as I used to, and was perhaps ir...