The controversial writer talks about the hostile reaction to her 2012 account of the breakdown of her marriage and how she finally rediscovered her voice
It is one of those summer days when England is pretending to be another country, and flinty Stiffkey, on the north Norfolk coast, is festive in the heat, the sea shining, the marshes expansive, the sky endless. This is where I find the writer Rachel Cusk. She spends half the year here, the other half in London's Tufnell Park. We arrive at the same moment at her front door and as she gets out of the car, she is all grace, though possibly a touch flustered at having narrowly avoided arriving after me. She is dressed in jeans and a navy shirt. She is pretty, elegant and taller than I had imagined. I realise it is the most hazardous thing to have expectations and I'm talking about depth not height here to be tempted into thinking one knows her from her writing.
For there is a sense in which Cusk is a mystery; it is one of the reasons I want to meet her. She has written seven novels (the first, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread first novel prize in 1993; others have been similarly feted) and three memoirs in which she spares herself nothing. She writes about strong feelings and excites them. Her book about motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), written after her first daughter was born and when she was pregnant with the second, got a violently mixed reception (she is the mother mums love to hate on Mumsnet) because it dared to describe new motherhood's limbo in exhausting, exhaustive detail.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.
It is one of those summer days when England is pretending to be another country, and flinty Stiffkey, on the north Norfolk coast, is festive in the heat, the sea shining, the marshes expansive, the sky endless. This is where I find the writer Rachel Cusk. She spends half the year here, the other half in London's Tufnell Park. We arrive at the same moment at her front door and as she gets out of the car, she is all grace, though possibly a touch flustered at having narrowly avoided arriving after me. She is dressed in jeans and a navy shirt. She is pretty, elegant and taller than I had imagined. I realise it is the most hazardous thing to have expectations and I'm talking about depth not height here to be tempted into thinking one knows her from her writing.
For there is a sense in which Cusk is a mystery; it is one of the reasons I want to meet her. She has written seven novels (the first, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread first novel prize in 1993; others have been similarly feted) and three memoirs in which she spares herself nothing. She writes about strong feelings and excites them. Her book about motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), written after her first daughter was born and when she was pregnant with the second, got a violently mixed reception (she is the mother mums love to hate on Mumsnet) because it dared to describe new motherhood's limbo in exhausting, exhaustive detail.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.