Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and essayist born in Saskatoon in 1967.
Cusk was educated at Magdalen College School. She writes in English and holds United Kingdom citizenship. Her fiction includes the novels The Country Life, Arlington Park, Outline, and Second Place, works that span several decades of her career as a prose writer.
Among the awards Cusk has received are the Somerset Maugham Award, the Costa Book Awards, and the Prix Femina étranger, a French prize given to works of foreign literature. She has also been granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, recognitions that reflect her standing in both the American and British literary communities.
Her output across novels and essays places her work consistently within the registers of fiction and personal prose, with titles such as Outline and Second Place standing alongside earlier novels such as Arlington Park and The Country Life as part of a sustained engagement with literary form.
Quotes by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk's insights on:
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
The families are on display – it’s part of how they function. Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement. I suppose they are exposing what they have created, as an artist feels compelled to do.
I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.
At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn’t really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing – no narrative dramas – to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential – it’s as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.
There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.
Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me.