#feministfriday episode 509 | a true book
Good morning or afternoon,
Only one topic for Fem Fri this week, because I'm reading a book that I love so much I really have to tell you about it; Rachel Cusk's The Country Life.
Maybe you already know and love Rachel Cusk from the Outline trilogy. I think I've only read one of those, and whilst I enjoyed it it didn't leave me gasping for more. The Country Life, however, is hitting really all of my KPIs for books by being:
Set in a large house in the countryside
Full of rich people behaving terribly
Replete with startling metaphors
Genuinely extremely funny
Here's Rachel Cusk herself talking about her early works, I guess you need to subscribe to the Paris Review if you want to read all of this interview, but I am happy to see how she thinks of this book that is, at the time of this interview, quite far in the past:
Saving Agnes had been this extraordinary experience when it came out. It was my first experience of attention, and reams and reams were written about the book, and I couldn’t believe it. Then with The Temporary, there were still lots of things written about it, but it wasn’t the same. So I think then I understood that it was a relationship, and that my life and my state of being had to be offered to the writing project for the true book to come out of it. I hadn’t done that the second time. I had written a mental book. I’d tried to think of a narrative or story. It hadn’t come out of my insides. So then I understood. The next book I wrote, The Country Life (1997), that was a true book.
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 246
Photo courtesy of Rachel Cusk. Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 to British parents, who moved the family to Los Angeles, then to England, where Cusk lives to this day. She began publishing in her midtwenties—clever and assured novels featuring men and women attempting, with li...
Love,
Alex.