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. Another review, in a different paper: this one long and articulate where the first was brief and blunt. 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. 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." David Licata (DL):Over the 12 years of the shoot, two cinematographers, Andy Bowley and Wolfgang Held, coincidentally shot the same amount of footage each, about 50 hours, and the difference between them was something like 10 minutes. It’s because of the two of them that the film began and kept going. Wolfgang and I had worked on my previous film, Tango Octogenario, and when I shared the idea with him, he was intrigued and said he’d love to be involved. Andy’s enthusiasm for and positivity in the project sustained me and gave me the confidence to keep going, even after we finished production, maybe especially after production. Without them, I may have never finished shooting.

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. Fittingly, the film begins with Soleri and ends with Stein ruminating about his mentor and what it means to carry on a legacy. Andy Bowley (L) and David Licata (R) working on A Life’s Work When did you form your production company – and what was the original motivation for its formation?David Licata (DL):I became excited by the idea in 2004, Wolfgang and I began shooting in 2005, Andy and I shot the final interview in 2017. I spent 2017 to 2019 editing and fundraising for post-production. The film was completed in 2020. 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." 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. David Licata (DL):I’m David Licata. I’m a filmmaker and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. I live on the Upper West Side of New York City.

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." DL:The first interview was the most difficult, with the architect Paolo Soleri. The film is about people who will not complete their work in their lifetime, and I had heard from a few people that Soleri became angry when he was asked, “when will Arcosanti be finished?” And yet, I had to ask. I hemmed and hawed, and he shook his head and with an “I knew it” smile on his face, said, “That’s the end of the interview.” We both laughed and he graciously evaded answering and we continued the interview. DL:A Life’s Work didn’t really have a tight shooting schedule. The documentary had only my self-imposed deadlines. Jeff Stein on the set of A Life’s Work directed by David Licata David Licata (DL): A Life’s Work is a documentary that asks the question. What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? DL:Knowing a good story when I come across it and knowing how to tell it. I started my artistic journey as a writer of fiction and nonfiction (which I still do) and I came to filmmaking relatively late. But all those years of writing was invaluable.David Licata (DL):Wearing so many hats was frustrating, and I often wished I had an assistant. But just as often wearing all those hats was a valuable learning experience. I was forced to communicate deeply and personally with so many people, and so many different kinds of people–academics, farmers, geneticists, astronomers, architects, city planners, record collectors, DJs, antiquities experts, students, ministers, singers, to name a few. I learned a lot from each of them about their particular fields, and I learned a lot about how to talk with all kinds of people. Paolo Soleri and David Licata in A Life’s Work directed by David Licata Cusk and her family move from London to a university town. She encounters older parents and a more patriarchal culture. Her new acquaintances all ask her, “What does your husband do?” After a disastrous visit to a playgroup at which both Cusk and her baby find themselves bullied by their peers, Cusk rebels against the fact that “conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies…Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams.” DL:I reached out to organizations and people who were associated with the four topics of the film: architecture, gospel music, astronomy, and arborists. And I reached out to the press that covered those topics, as well as the locales in which we shot. This resulted in a few people wanting to screen it for their organization or their school, and I love doing that just as much as screening at a festival.

DL:We had about 30 shoot days, on average, 8-hour days per shoot day. I don’t like to work long days, and I don’t expect anyone else to. What are your personal experiences putting on all these hats/responsibilities (simultaneously)? Tell us about story, writing, and production? Compounding all this is sleeplessness. For month after month, Cusk cannot sleep through the night. Soon the “muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp…I no longer slept in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty, and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins."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. 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." Financing: Grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Yip Harburg Foundation, Indiegogo fundraiser, and self.

DL:After watching the film, I hope the viewer recognizes that the path of the subjects in the film is similar to their own, which I hope will prompt them to ask themselves “What will my legacy be?”DL:Marketing is very important; without it how would people see your film? I’ve always thought of film festivals as the best marketing tool for an independent film. I think it is a rare independent project that succeeds without showing at film festivals. 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."