Novels, she realised, were full of artificial and embarrassing contrivances: plot, character, dialogue, suspense. By the time she recovered from what she described as “creative death”, she had made some important decisions. Following the critical mauling of Aftermath, Cusk found herself unable to write for several years. Each memoir appeared to be on the rebound from the one before, a phoenix-like act of self-destruction that laid the path for creative reinvention.īut not without burning the author. Three vivisections of English middle-class domesticity followed ( In the Fold, Arlington Park and The Bradshaw Variations), interspersed with two more unsparingly candid essayistic works, about her disastrous attempt to move abroad ( The Last Supper: a Summer in Italy in 2009) and then her divorce ( Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation in 2012). It was motherhood that prompted it – her memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), was about as pure an expression of outrage at the indignities and injustices of childbearing as seems publishable, and marked a shift from the acerbic social comedies of her early career. Oh to have a midlife crisis as fruitful as Rachel Cusk’s! The 54-year-old novelist has been in a state of inspired cataclysm for at least two decades now.
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