Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk (born 8 February 1967) is a Canadian-born author.

Quotes

• Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous…
  • On feeling that writing fiction was fake and embarrassing, as quoted in Kate Kellaway "Rachel Cusk: 'Aftermath was creative death. I was heading into total silence'" The Guardian (24 August 2014)

• I annoy everybody, not just certain women…I think it is because I'm not interested in the group, only in the individual. What happens is my message enters the conflicted person reading it who is half self, half society but does not know where one begins and the other ends. I light up that conflict and it makes people angry.
  • On why her writing might cause a stir, as quoted in Kate Kellaway in "Rachel Cusk: 'Aftermath was creative death. I was heading into total silence'" The Guardian (24 August 2014)

• A journalist recently told me that she had been sent to find out who I was. [...] There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.
  • On abandoning being a memoirist, as quoted in Judith Thurman "Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel" The New Yorker (31 July 2017)

• I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does.
  • On her anxieties as a writer, as quoted in Cat Zhang "I Have Lost All Interest in Having a Self" Slate (19 September 2019)
  • From a review of Coventry: Essays (2019)

• I can't even remember Saving Agnes. I haven't read it in years and years. I don’t think I could read it. It's a strange thing about having been publishing for so long. As with any memory of yourself at twenty-five, it feels like your cellular being has completely changed. It's not just photographs of me with a weird hairstyle at twenty-five—a novel is such an intricate document.
  • On how an author might revisit one of their earlier novels to reconnect with their past self, as quoted in Sheila Heti "Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246" The Paris Review (No. 232, Spring 2020)

• I could almost divide my life on either side of this line, between the things that are real and the things that are imitating reality and are synthetic or inauthentic, and the awful pain of being in the synthetic life or the synthetic relationship, the one that is a bit like the thing you want but is not it. So that was that book.
  • On the time periods before and after writing her book The Temporary (1995), as quoted in Sheila Heti "Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246" The Paris Review (Spring 2020)

About Cusk

• Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband Adrian] Clarke, whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids. She pours scorn on his "dependence" and "unwaged domesticity", but won't do chores herself because they make her feel, of all things, "unsexed". She is horrified when he demands half of every­thing in the divorce: "They’re my children," she snarls. "They belong to me."
  • Camilla Long "Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk", The Sunday Times (4 March 2012)
  • Long's review of Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation received the Hatchet Job of the Year award from Omnivore, an online magazine, in February 2013 for the best worst review of the preceding 12 months.