Cusk is making a point about the difficulty of keeping multiple factors in mind: Just as obsessing about her lines made her forget her presence on stage, fixating on cost could mean that a builder ...

The London-based novelist, personal essayist, and playwright Rachel Cusk is a figure of some controversy. Her 2001 memoir, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, an unsentimental depiction of the ...

Rachel Cusk is not a radical–at least not anymore. Critics lambasted her as a “bad mom” when she asserted that marriage and motherhood deprive women of any sense of self in her memoirs A Life’s Work ...

Several years ago, I attended a reading by Rachel Cusk from “Kudos,” the final installment of her “Outline” trilogy. She read from near the end of the novel, when the character Paola explains why she ...

Hatred of Cusk really peaked in 2012 with Aftermath: On Marriage And Separation—an elliptical, messy, often frustratingly over-intellectualized memoir about her split from her husband. “It’s not a ...

Start, as one tends to do in Rachel Cusk’s writing, with a house. It is not yours, but instead a farmhouse on the island property to which you have come as a renting vacationer. It has no obvious ...

Call it the semi-memoir, call it the autobiographical novel: an outpouring of deeply personal fiction from authors like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner—with more on the horizon this ...

If by their punctuation ye shall know them, then the key to Rachel Cusk is the colon. Most writers tend to use it sparingly, for emphasis or introduction, but Cusk is happy, in her new collection of ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. You know when you’re reading a page of Rachel Cusk’s fiction. Her narrators tug insistently if ...

In Rachel Cusk’s novels and nonfiction, it’s not unusual for a character to be in the process of renovating a house. In a 2016 essay, “Making House: Notes on Domesticity,” Cusk describes remodeling ...