A Reader’s Guide to Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk has become famous for writing novels in which female narrators observe the world around them with lacerating clarity. From early works such as Saving Agnes (1993) and The Country Life (1997), to her controversial memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012), and her career defining Outline trilogy, Cusk has become regarded as one of Britain’s most exacting prose stylists. 

Even in those early novels, Cusk’s penchant for the mot juste was present. In the years since the success of Outline, her writing has been defined by an ever greater commitment to literary minimalism. Her work of the 2020s often feels like an experiment in reduction, stripping away everything but the essential. Characters are frequently identified only by their initials, while even the books’ distinctive presentation, set in the sans serif typeface Optima, reflects an aesthetic of restraint and precision. 

Across 13 novels and six works of non-fiction, Cusk has been nominated for nearly every major literary prize, from the Somerset Maugham Award to the Booker Prize. To mark the publication of her latest novel, Life of M, what follows is an overview of Cusk’s work, designed to help you find your ideal point of entry.

The crowd favorite: Outline

Despite being practically mid-career by the time Outline was published in 2014, its success transformed Cusk from acclaimed novelist to literary powerhouse. Its eschewing of plot, and its barely concealed self-insert of Cusk herself as its protagonist, saw the novel becoming regarded as one of the prime examples of autofiction, a form of autobiographical fiction that would go on to dominate novels in the late 2010s. 

Outline follows a British writer who decamps to Greece to teach at a writing workshop for the summer. Over the chapters, she strikes up conversations with those around her — friends, locals, tourists — who reveal perhaps a bit too much to our hazy narrator. The book feels more like a collection of monologues rather than something resembling a novel. And yet, the result is absolutely enthralling. Two subsequent novels, Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), complete the Outline trilogy, often regarded as not just Cusk’s masterpiece, but a landmark in 21st century literature.

The beginning: Saving Agnes

Cusk’s first novel, Saving Agnes, announced her arrival on the British literary scene in 1993, when she was just 26 years old. The novel breezily follows the perpetually listless Agnes Day as she commutes to her job as a magazine sub-editor, bravely tolerates her wet blanket boyfriend and confides in her housemates in their dingy Islington flat. Despite being published more than 30 years ago, Cusk’s debut novel often feels strikingly contemporary. Perhaps it is the cool listlessness of Agnes or the aimlessness of her 20s that feels so reflective of the common themes of novels set in London now. The lightness of its plot, too, marks it as a precursor to the “vibes novel.” Cusk was duly rewarded for acutely capturing the mood of young people in the early 1990s, winning the Whitbread First Novel Award. 

The controversial: Aftermath

Nobody said being a Rachel Cusk fan was easy. For as long as she has been writing her uncompromising and caustic novels, she has been dogged by accusations of being, well, uncompromising and caustic. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in her non-fiction, particularly her controversial memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath. In A Life’s Work (2001), Cusk wrote about motherhood with a candour that deeply divided critics and readers alike, describing the grief she felt for her former independence and the stifling reality of being wholly responsible for another life. More than 20 years after its publication, however, the book is increasingly recognised for being far more reasonable than its reputation would lead you to believe.

The same cannot be said for Aftermath. Published in 2012, the memoir chronicles Cusk’s divorce after 10 years of marriage. Opening with a quotation from the Oresteia, she uses Aeschylus’ trilogy as an overarching metaphor for the collapse of her marriage. Throughout, Cusk is strikingly coy about the circumstances of the divorce itself, preferring to filter the experience through Greek tragedy rather than engage with its particulars. In doing so, the book rarely interrogates obvious questions of privilege, leaving parts of it feeling wholly detached from reality. The reviews were savage and Cusk later described the book as her “creative death.”

The often overlooked: Arlington Park

In 2007, Cusk was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for her sixth novel, Arlington Park. A loose reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it follows a group of housewives over the course of a single day in the fictional titular suburb. Its brief opening chapter, which simply observes the particular way the rain falls as dawn breaks, is Cusk at her most cinematic. 

Where Woolf and Cusk diverge, however, is in their choice of day. Clarissa Dalloway has flowers to buy and a party to host, while the women of Arlington Park wake to the most ordinary of weekdays, defined by school runs, shopping trips and domestic routines. The contrast is entirely in keeping with Cusk’s sensibility. Her novels are rarely driven by plot or incident. Instead, their brilliance often lies in their precise observations of quotidian life.

The latest: Life of M

In the weeks leading up to the publication of Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M, a sensational piece of literary gossip emerged. The novel’s enigmatic M, a celebrated actress whom the narrator follows around Paris in an attempt to write a kind of biography, was reportedly inspired by Cusk’s real life friendship with Natalie Portman. Reading the novel, Cusk hardly disguises the parallels. At one point, M is said to have given one of her most acclaimed performances in a psychological drama about a ballerina undergoing an identity crisis. Yet to approach Life of M as a juicy tell-all would be reductive. Instead, it is a novel about the privacy-shattering cost of fame.

As in the Outline trilogy, Cusk devotes far more attention to the life of M than to that of her narrator. Details of the narrator’s own life, including her husband’s illness, arrive almost as asides, eclipsed by M’s story. It raises the intriguing possibility that perhaps, for once, Cusk’s true surrogate is not the narrator but M herself. After all, Cusk is a literary celebrity in her own right and her public has often been scrupulous.