The dissociation created by this loss renders her ear more acute, able to listen without the static of context. Cusk is able to discern a “purity” in the stories she hears because she, too, is a stranger, both to the speaker and to herself, as a result of her lost membership in the tribe of marriage and family. “What you have is people”: this statement suggests a generalized category whose particular features can only be deciphered by acts of narrative. The intense experience of hearing this became the framework of the novel.” I could hear a purity of narrative in the way people described their lives.

I became attuned to these encounters because I had no frame or context any more. What you have is people, strangers in the street, and the only way you can know them is by what they say. “You are chucked out of the house, on the street, not defended any more, not a member of anything, you have no history, no network. In the wake of her divorce, Cusk felt abandoned by the social order of things: In a 2018 Guardian interview, Cusk talks about the circumstances that led to her writing Outline. Cusk casts a spell on her readers, one that transforms some of us into acolytes. Reviewers move away from their own positions, assuming the de-personalized voice of the narratives under investigation. I want to write about conversation in contemporary literature.” Patricia Lockwood’s LRB review of Outline underscores the magnetism of Cusk’s narrative exchanges: “you enter the speed and the artifice and the belief with her.” Throughout the review, Lockwood’s prose sounds a lot like her subject’s. In the Sydney Review of Books, Melinda Harvey narrates three Cuskian short stories, including a portrait of a graduate student who announces, to his mostly silent interlocutor, “I know what I want to write about. Two reviews that appeared at the time of the trilogy’s publication suggest that I am not alone.

I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.” In Outline, the novel’s narrator Faye remarks, “What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. More: I want, somehow, to let go of the need to advise or direct-in general and in relation to the stories that I hear. My craving takes, however, a very particular form: it wants to re-create conversations as they are represented in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy: Outline (2014), Transit (2017), and Kudos (2018). That is, I dream of hearing stories and then writing them down. Presumably most if not all of the planet’s extroverts, and many of its introverts, are sick of talking at screens small and large we long to engage, face-to-face, with friends and strangers. First on my list: in-person conversation. After my second vaccination in 2021, dreams of life after COVID-19 began to find a foothold.

Rachel cusk trilogy