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The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

Rachel Cusk

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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Right
Literature
Challenge
Aftermath
Writing
Understanding
Criticism
Functions
Work
Less
Morality
Reaction
Believe
Write
Worse
Believing
Life
Didn
Function
Reactions
Littles
Perhaps
Touched
Coped
Find
Cases
Upset
Criticisms
Little
Challenges
Weren
Artistically

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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
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Modern morality is all about perception.
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
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It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
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In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She wants to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.
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The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
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The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be taught - is disturbing.
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A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
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Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
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A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
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Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.
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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.
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