She Got Up and Went Away: Rachel Cusk on Making an Exit

Near the end of rachel cusk’s Kudos, which concerns a writer, Faye, at the peak of her career, giving readings and interviews at a European literary festival, her son telephones from London. There has been an accident, and he is distraught.

People just act as if I’m not there.… They ask me things, he said, but they don’t connect the things up. They don’t relate them to things I’ve already told them. There are just all these meaningless facts.

You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

(229–30)

The conversation could be about Faye’s experience—she has, over the course of the festival, attended a series of interviews at which even the journalists assigned to ask her questions didn’t bother. It might also refer to the sheer difficulty of Cusk’s trilogy of novels, Outline, Transit, and Kudos, which, in its attention to listening, hearing, and, by extension, reading, confronts a world that does not listen, or connect. In Cusk’s hands autofiction, a genre linked to memoir, autobiography, and confession, becomes a forum that considers how, to what degree, and to what end, readers may share in the experiences of others—the trilogy takes up the implicit project, in other words, of the novel.

Faye, the first-person narrator throughout, and whose story figures, in some way at least, at the centre, narrates her story by telling those of others: she gives a first-hand account of what other people say. The novels proceed through a series of looping, overlapping conversations that suggest telling a story is a collaborative act: without a good listener, a story cannot be told. A minor, darkly comic episode in Kudos—about a skier who attempted the insurmountable and lived to tell the tale—suggests at once the subject and the method:

Moments before the accident, the woman said she remembered feeling an extraordinary sense of her own power, and also of her freedom, despite the fact that she knew the mountain could rescind her freedom in an instant. Yet in those moments it suddenly seemed like a childlike game, an opportunity to take leave of reality, and when she went over the precipice and the mountain fell away beneath her, for an instant she almost believed that she could fly. What happened next had to be pieced together from other people’s accounts, since she didn’t remember it herself.

(58)

When the series opens, with Outline, Faye has been shattered by a divorce; she, too, must “be pieced together from other people’s accounts.” She encounters, quite literally, lost fragments, pieces of herself—and, it seems, only herself—everywhere she looks. A suspicious number of the people she meets, for example, are also divorced, or estranged, whether from home, or from children, or from themselves. The novels unfold through a series of incidental conversations that take place en route, and in the moment, if not in medias res, the products of chance meetings, on planes, outside tube stations, at conferences, and in hotels. The pacing of the novels is lifelike: it mimics that of conversation and unfolds in real time. Cusk’s project seems to be to record actual conversations about actual events, events that have happened to Rachel Cusk—and which any reader of the literary reviews, never mind her actual memoirs, A Life’s Work and Aftermath, knows have happened to Rachel Cusk.

I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father. It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion…. It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had...