These novels put forth a provocatively inverted form of autofiction, a genre that usually features a fictional first-person narrator who is presented as possibly real through an often realistically meandering accumulation of events, thoughts, relationships, and details that may or may not overlap with those in the author’s own life though often considered petty or irrelevant, the question of “ how true” an autofictional novel is inevitably becomes part of the experience of reading it.

With the Outline books, she hit upon a form that illuminated the complicated “relationship between the story and the truth,” and between fiction and autobiography. (The other memoir-2009’s The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy-was mostly inoffensive, except that it got the author sued.) After this, she realized that her “mode of autobiography had come to an end.” She “could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.” People hated 2001’s A Life’s Work for its ambivalent (and supposedly callous) attitude toward motherhood they hated 2012’s Aftermath for what they said was a self-exonerating treatment of her divorce.

Over 11 years, Cusk published three memoirs that attracted disproportionate moral outrage from critics (and forum users). (One chapter begins, “Once Agnes had been in love and since then she had just been in pain” this passage is followed by one in which Cusk puns on the diminutive height of a stranger who hits on her protagonist, who is very tall and seeking someone who sees “eye to eye” with her.) Yet Cusk came to be disillusioned with what struck her as the ludicrousness of traditional fiction-the absurdity, as she put it in an interview with The Guardian, of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together.” She condemned traditional fiction as “fake and embarrassing,” claiming that literary elements such as description and character “are dead or dying in reality as well as in art,” and said that “autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.”Īt the same time, autobiography held its own problems.

Even her first novel, 1993’s Saving Agnes, has marks of the quality for which she is beloved, a great sensitivity fortified by artisanal bitchiness. The author of 10 novels and three controversial memoirs, Cusk is now best known for her Outline trilogy, which is widely considered a masterpiece intervention in the form of the novel and was completed in 2018.

Rachel cusk new novel