Looking up from the rear-view mirror

Tracing the path of Cusk’s career shows a writer working to escape the confinements of conventional literary structures. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993 and, as the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award in Britain, immediately marked her out as an author to watch. In some senses this debut is an unsurprising tale, the story of a young woman seeking to make her way in the world, to find love and fulfilment in what one might call an ordinary way. Yet towards the end of the novel we see its heroine chafing against the life designed for her, observing herself “trailing along in the wake of her aspirations, driving through her days with eyes fixed in a rear-view mirror on the road behind”.
Cusk’s next novel, The Temporary, explored office life and its dynamics of power and attraction with a gimlet eye; in The Country Life, published in 1997, she stepped smoothly into the English comic tradition, entering into conversation with Stella Gibbons’ 1932 classic Cold Comfort Farm. Cusk’s heroine, Stella Benson, decamps from London to rural Sussex to care for the disabled son of a wealthy family; fickle, unreliable narrative voices make the novel a surprising and exciting delight. Her early work certainly offers sophisticated pleasures: but there was more radical work to come. Within these first books is a sense of women bound by circumstances yet straining against their strictures; Cusk would soon come to put the questions asked by these first texts out in the open.

The problems of writing are the problems of living

Rachel Cusk’s English parents left Hertfordshire for Canada — where she was born, in Saskatoon, in 1967, the second of four children. The family moved to California when she was a baby, and returned to England when she was eight. As Cusk would later recall, the shift didn’t bring satisfaction, and she connects the move to the peripatetic life she has lived since to that time: "It was in Los Angeles that my mother's pining for England set up in me that discourse of here and there. She fantasised about an England where everything is perfect, and when we returned, we moved house countless times.” At eleven she was sent to St Mary’s School, Cambridge and would then study for a degree in English Literature at New College, Oxford. In the years to come she moved to London, back to Oxford, and made homes in Somerset, Bristol, Brighton, and Italy before — post Brexit — settling in Paris where she now lives with her husband and grown daughters.
In her work, Cusk demonstrates that what is highly specific is also universal, and that the issues which confront the artist are issues which confront us all. “Essentially, I think all the problems of writing are problems of living,” she has said. “And all the problems of creativity are problems of living. They are all problems which we all share.” In 2001 she published A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, which marked her departure into the next phase of her radical work. A brilliantly unsparing account — often very funny, too — of a woman’s transformation from single soul to mother-soul, it is a reframing of the often pat or anodyne narratives that surround maternity. “A Life’s Work explores the many incursions that motherhood makes into the female self,” as author Heidi Julavits wrote. “The act of mothering erodes the individual, but equally obliterating is the mainstream cultural narrative of how unceasingly great motherhood is.” Cusk stated that her aims for the book were almost disarmingly simple, making no great claims to philosophy or analysis. “I have merely written down what I thought of the experience of having a child in a way that I hope other people can identify with.” The powerful reaction to the text (both high praise and astonished shock) revealed how rare her honesty and forthrightness was — and remains.

Creative death and rebirth

Cusk continued this interrogation of the matter of her own life in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published in 2012. Aside from the personal toll taken by the events of her life, the response to the book was in many quarters brutal, and Cusk has been frank about the cost she had to bear. “Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath,” she has said. “That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.” So we must ask: what does it take for a woman to be honest about the circumstances of her own life? Cusk’s work accosts the patriarchal structures, often invisible and co-opted by men and women both, which so many live inside while hardly being aware that they do. “Freedom, when it comes, is nothing if it leaves people un-free behind you,” she told the Paris Review: the integrity of her writing opens up a road for others to follow.

A female sentence

For the true artist, destruction levels the ground and creates space for the new. Cusk has said that for some time following the publication of Aftermath, she could neither read nor write. She has spoken of the “trench” that she dug laboriously between “something that looks like a person, that looks like an identity and then the person who’s actually creating”: but it is all too easy for critics and readers to conflate the creator with what she has made — most especially when the artist is a woman. Outline was published in 2014, the first of a trilogy of novels that would reset Cusk’s territory. Transit followed in 2017 and Kudos the next year. Superficially, these remarkable novels bear some similarities with the life lived by a figure like Cusk. But although narrated by a female writer, married, divorced, with children, travelling, attending literary conferences, their “annihilated perspective”, as Cusk puts it, builds an extraordinary home for the reader.
Faye — her name is only mentioned once in each novel — is more often than not simply a receptacle for information received from the world around her; without her interpretation the reader is left, thrillingly, to fend for herself. In Transit, Faye converses with her cousin Lawrence, who has left his wife for another woman, upending his life. But these events “had barely left a mark on the outward appearance of Lawrence’s life” the narrator states; some pages later, in conversation with Lawrence, Faye questions his belief that he can command his own life: she herself has felt no such sense of command. “What Lawrence’s remarks about desire and self-control had left out, I said, was the element of powerlessness that people called fate. ‘That wasn’t fate,’ Lawrence said. ‘It was because you’re a woman.’” Cusk lays these cards on the table: it is up to the reader how he picks them up. A passage such as this speaks to the way in which Cusk has worked to create “Not a feminist space, and not even particularly a sort of gendered space, but . . . a female sentence, a female paragraph, a truly female writing that is not a response to men and the ways in which women have been constructed, and that isn’t motivated by anger or injustice or anything else.”

Attached to life

Her work has been lauded all over the world and shortlisted for numerous prizes. Her 2021 novel Second Place won the Prix Femina étranger in France in 2022; it circles her fascination with D. H. Lawrence, drawing as it does on a memoir by socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan which recalled Lawrence’s stay at her artists’ colony in New Mexico in the 1930s. She has created a new translation of Euripides’s Medea which premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2015; her wide-ranging intelligence encompasses brilliant critical writing too, collected in a book of essays, Coventry, published in 2019.
Her work defies convention and description. It is too simple to label the Outline trilogy “autofiction”: she is often compared to writers like Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgård, but her voice is singular, purely her own: she has remade the matter of the quotidian into something powerfully eternal that speaks to how each person may choose to live in the world — or test out what it is like when it seems like choice, the ability to control one’s life, has been removed. “I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life. [You] build a novel. You have to build it like a building so that it stays standing when you’re not in it,” Cusk says. Her work is a remarkable structure, cool, intricate and sturdy enough to last the ages.