The Confessions of Rachel Cusk

The Confessions of Rachel Cusk The Confessions of Rachel Cusk Autofiction collapses the distance between creator and product. But in her latest novel, Life of M, Rachel Cusk seeks an escape from this confessional mode. Life of M: A Novel by Rachel Cusk Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026, 192 pp. What is the question of autofiction: Is it true, or is it a good story? Does it matter? Or do we not, in fact, find the speculation to be its own bloodsport? Perhaps the collapse between the two is what interests us most. Autofiction is a widely misunderstood genre: work that typically employs an avatar of the author (who usually appears in the first person) to provide a modicum of distance between them and their work, while still exploring autobiographical material. In the 2010s, the genre became a publishing phenomenon. Writers as diverse as Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, Annie Ernaux, Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, and Karl Ove Knausgaard were somewhat incongruously lumped together for their investigation of the line between truth and myth. Practitioners of autofiction often receive a highly gendered reception—not least the British-Canadian writer Rachel Cusk. Cusk wrote a number of comic domestic novels in the 1990s that were politely received, before her memoirs caused a veritable commotion. From her fraught relationship with her parents to her difficulty forming a family, she began exploring her own life as a direct source of material. She appeared to instrumentalize confession as a weapon, not unlike the feminist consciousness-raising of years prior, and received intense scrutiny for her relationship to her ex-husband and her children in outlets like the Sunday Times. In Aftermath (2012), her memoir of divorce, Cusk acknowledged the power of the stories we tell about our lives and our relationships, and the gendered roles within them. “My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously,” she wrote. “This belief of his couldn’t be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth.” Cusk’s own biography is fairly mundane. She grew up in Los Angeles, Suffolk, and Cambridge before studying English at Oxford. She became a well-awarded novelist fairly young, even before becoming a darling of magazines like Granta. Already known for her flinty prose and steely personality, she became a literary superstar after the release of the Outline trilogy in the 2010s. She eventually remarried and moved to Paris, finally gaining some distance from the country she was famous for dramatizing. Yet over time, Cusk has also moved away from the confessional mode. She has a habit of publicly excising her previous novels from the canon, denouncing straightforward fiction as “fake and embarrassing” and “utterly ridiculous.” “If we re-examined our relationship to one another, we’d probably find that there are not that many links between conventional literary form and living,” she once told the Yale Review. Her Outline trilogy was bracing precisely because of its refusal to account for the interior life of its protagonist, who is also a middle-aged female writer attending literary festivals abroad. Instead, it is everyone around her who tries to impart upon her the meaning of life. It is as if, through the act of confession, Cusk had emptied herself of meaning. “I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told the New Yorker in 2018. Coherence—both of a discrete self and of a stable narrative—had vacated her after the divorce. Without the normative nuclear family, everything, including femininity and social niceties, falls apart. “There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it,” she once said. In another kind of escape, perhaps, Cusk has turned to parables of artistic woe and inspiration, including in her latest novel, Life of M. The book plays heavily on the reader’s expectations, refracting the ideas that devoted fans bring to her work. (Speculation has even emerged that the book is about her friendship with Natalie Portman.) In the evolution of her writing—the aimless twenty-something ennui of Saving Agnes (1993); the brutal memoirs of child-rearing and breakdown; the flat, reflective Outline trilogy; and finally this latest round of artistic fables—we can trace the evolution of our culture’s turbulent obsession with disclosure. While autofiction is not the same as an actual confession, the two remain enmeshed. The confessional is absolute, an attempt at piecing together reality after the loss of innocence. Experience is the memoir’s trump card. In autofiction, by contrast, memory is warped. Capturing a subjective feeling or a specific narrative is more important than a faithful reconstruction. The gap that occurs while chasing the truth is the more interesting philosophical pursuit. How many liberties can, or should, an author like Cusk take? As our culture becomes fed up with the exploitative, repetitive nature of the personal essay or the self-pitying memoir, it seems clear why some authors have shifted toward poetic elisions and fables rather than the blunt instrument of fact. During one moment in Life of M, the narrator is reading “a book by a woman who had been sexually abused by her stepfather throughout her childhood.” The description also reads like a curious refraction of Cusk’s own body of work: It had come into the world and been seized upon and swallowed down, like a draught of something for which people were thirsty. The reason was the unusual tone of the writer’s voice as she testified to things that by rights should have erased her. This tone was neither personal nor impersonal, it possessed a deep and unmistakable authority, the authority of an object. It was as if some household item—a chair, for instance—had suddenly gained the power to speak. Cusk seems to be gesturing to the exacting memoirs of Annie Ernaux and Neige Sinno while distancing herself from their direct nature. These writers, known for their spare and unflinching portraits of a back-alley abortion and rape respectively, received widespread acclaim for their work detailing their own lives. Their vulnerability is more naked than hers: Ernaux and Sinno make no attempt to fictionalize their pain. Does publicizing that pain expel it? Perhaps Cusk’s turn toward the fantastical is a way to evade the murky politics of memoir and autofiction altogether, when the confessional mode has come under fire. For a time, feminists praised the memoir as a way to speak truth to power, a way to fight back against the silence of patriarchy. As self-publishing platforms like Substack began to threaten the authority of established editorial institutions, individuals sought to reclaim the righteous power of vulnerability and revelation. Writers tried to tell their stories on their own terms, yet confession was critiqued for its naked individuality and its lack of authoritative context. “Brave” became a slur for writing that was coded as feminine. Confessional essays on xoJane gave way to takedowns of Roxane Gay, and a declaration that “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over.” Cusk has certainly had her own brush with such negative press. She was condemned after the publication of A Life’s Work (2001), her bracing memoir on the downsides of motherhood, for not propagating the holy cult of maternity. “Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced,” Cusk later reflected. Already the lines between author, persona, and morality were blurring. Today, non-celebrity memoirs are rarely reviewed and personal essays have been relegated from the literary realm to the hot-take economy. There is a sense that they’re played out. There is, after all, no dearth of personalities to examine when we can easily scroll someone’s confessions on social media. Their private life is a punchline, not a thousand-word apologia. Editors now request that personal essays are based on something systemic, that they point to larger contexts, often political ones. The “braided essay” has emerged as the new publishing buzzword for writing that is able to wed both the personal and the political, providing intellectual scaffolding and cover for vulnerability. These shifts betray the uneasy relationship between the emotional and the critical approach. The confessional’s cultural purchase has gone up and down as consumer tastes wax and wane. Usually, women are the first on the chopping block. Work that defies genre is still likely to cause a stir. The critic Greta Rainbow has pointed to autotheory practitioners like Maggie Nelson as proof that first-person writing can still cause outrage and debate. Providing the “situation,” as Vivian Gornick puts it in The Situation and the Story, allows the personal to be more than just a diatribe. It gives depth to the ache. But few writers know how to untangle the story from the situation: We’ve all read enough diary entries online to know this. For Cusk, however, narrative trumps experience; she’s usually more interested in plot than feelings—at least until her more recent novels. Cusk has always bucked against gendered readings of her work. In her books, vulnerability and grit go hand in hand. “Stories need cruelty in order for them to work,” one writer ventures in Kudos. As some critics have noted, Cusk is interested in how becoming a writer has alienated her from traditional womanhood, even going so far as to call herself a “transvestite.” For the reserved author of Outline, for instance, the intersection of narrative and honesty is oppressive. Like with her troubled relationship to gender, she would rather break free from the demands of truth. But even the Outline trilogy had the vague semblance of a plot: A woman wanders around Greece meeting her fellow writers before returning home to fix up her house. In Second Place (2021), however, Cusk seemed to burn the novel behind her as she wrote it. “You see,” its protagonist declares, “I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force—the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that all our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out—no matter how long it takes—for the best.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book that followed, Parade (2024), was her least narratively inclined to date, reading as a collection of short stories rather than a singular work of fiction. Life of M gathers all of Cusk’s signature themes, especially her frustration with character. Like Parade, the novel is sparse and mythic, composed of a series of hazily drawn impressions cut by acute portraits of urban malaise. The titular “M” is a movie star; the unnamed narrator wants to write her autobiography. M is someone trapped by expectations, motherhood, family, art, and fame. She struggles with the roles available to her and is considering a screenplay based on her life. She is ultimately disillusioned by the “role” she’s been pushed into, both in life and in the narrator’s own book—the one contained in the pages of Life of M: I don’t like the way you portray me, she said. Actually, it’s hurtful. But it isn’t you, I said. It isn’t anyone. She looked at me coldly. You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity, she said. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love. But you’re just playing a character, I said. The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of. Writers and painters are Cusk’s objects for a good reason. Her stories seem to argue that the art-making process is sculptural, as if chiseling away life’s excess material will give us the unvarnished truth. Throughout her novels, Cusk is fascinated by the ethics of artists. The cost of being an author includes spineless men cornering you on planes and beaches, and invasive fans and spurious gossip in the press. Still, the relentless desire for epiphany drives them on. Artists are just as curious about the mythic process of creation as non-artists, and they bestow a near saintlike status on the writers that they themselves admire. A novel about an actor therefore provides a perfect new realm for Cusk to explore. “Sitting in the garden,” Cusk writes, “M said she did not consider herself to be an artist. She saw herself as merely an element in the creations of others.” Frequently, her narrators and characters wonder about their own autonomy and dramatis personae. “We think of our own history as a series of collisions,” the narrator reflects after witnessing an accident between two cyclists, “to which we attached a narrative of wrong and right that obscured their essential violence. We see that there was nothing especially intentional about the wrongs that were done to us. It was simply the collision of another character with our own. We do not operate any longer through character.” The book flits between the narrator’s first-person narration, first-person plural interludes, and sections written about M in the third person. As the book goes on, the narrator vanishes until the final confrontation between the two, where we realize the book itself is a fabrication—a novel about M and not a biography. M, for her part, is struggling to assemble a normal life away from the spotlight as she takes on various acting roles. This dissolution—the ability of someone to evaporate in plain sight—fascinates the narrator. The artist’s power of observation is another of her key motifs. She frequently zeroes in on the exacting perception that the creative process requires. It is interesting, then, that Cusk has also decided that her narrative needs intellectual scaffolding. Hybrid work, like Life of M, performs a dialectical, metatextual function. The alternating perspectives provide its dualistic structure—the text and a commentary, the Torah and the Talmud, the art and the artist. Braided fiction like this certainly isn’t new, but Cusk’s work reveals the contemporary author’s self-conscious attempt to compete with new media and the immediacy of the recursive internet essay. Cusk’s turn toward the archetypes and myths of artists and actors is an attempt to size-up the competition, to move from the personal toward the wider world. The anxiety of medium and influence continues. Of course her latest book is about a film star. Life of M also offers some of Cusk’s most beautiful passages in years on the fleetingness of our collective lives. If the Outline trilogy served as a bridge from the individual to the community, as men and women spill their guts to the nearly mute narrator, books like Parade, Second Place, and her latest privilege the subjective lives of characters beyond their respective narrators. The imperious “I” has been replaced by the reflective “we.” The book ends with a twist. M asks the self-effacing narrator if they are “a guy or a girl,” forcing us to again consider the metatextual aspect of the book, and how we do or don’t read Cusk as a narrator. In dramatizing the art of exposure, Cusk likens the construction of gender to labor. Being—or becoming—a woman is, after all, hard work. Long-term readers of Cusk may simply assume the narrator is a woman: Is she trolling us? Yet such jokes require buy-in. To laugh, we need to have read her oeuvre enough to understand her ideas about womanhood, masculinity, and cross-dressing. Perhaps it is Cusk telling us that she’s really a man, that she possesses the icy determination required of women who achieve such radical success. Can we both live in the world and interpret it at the same time? That’s the premise of autofiction, even as Cusk moves further and further away from the self-effacing narrators that catapulted her into the international literary scene. Cusk’s newer fables try to split the difference, relying on her familiar alter-egos, while moving into wispy fantasies about the holiness of total art. What is an artist if not an interpreter who tries to hide behind their work? The artist is an object that has suddenly gained the ability to speak. Autofiction collapses the distance between creator and product, or confession and art. The author becomes the work. She offers us a piece of herself. Untangling the two, as Cusk notes, is difficult. Thankfully, the self-reflexive genre offers us a commentary on the art of living: Then at other times we’re very busy and the idea of creating ourselves seems less important. But suddenly we find it is there, the question: Who are we? Yet everyone else seems to know who we are. Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, the Paris Review, the Nation, and Vogue, among other outlets. Herculine is her debut novel.