Outline
A narrator who asks and listens and tells us almost nothing about herself. The analytic position written as a form.
she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.
Across a single day in Athens, where the narrator has come to teach a writing course, a sequence of people talk to her: a man she meets on the plane, fellow writers, students, friends. She asks questions, records what they say, and offers little of her own account. Their monologues do the work of the book, and what she thinks or wants surfaces only in the pressure she puts on their words, in what she chooses to notice and what she lets pass.
The technique gives a therapist a study of the attending position held for the length of a book. Each speaker arranges a life into a story for a listener who will not compete, and the arranging is the revelation: the marriages defended, the griefs rationed, the versions of the self that collapse under a second question. Cusk draws a person by omission, legible through the accounts that gather around her silence.
About the author
Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk, born in 1967 in Saskatoon, Canada, to British parents, is a British writer who works across fiction and memoir. Her novels include the Outline trilogy, made up of Outline, Transit, and Kudos, which use an unnamed narrator who records the conversations of others. In memoir she is known for A Life's Work, about motherhood, and Aftermath, about divorce. Her writing is spare and observant, often concerned with how women shape their own lives.
Details
- 2014