A woman’s life

I’d never heard of Rachel Cusk until I read a review of her latest book. I was intrigued and went back to read one of her earlier books. She writes about people she meets in a powerful and detailed way. She tells their stories, and the people she meets (or imagines, I’m not sure) tell wonderful stories, mostly of their relationships. I was reminded of Knausgaard, Proust, and even the oral historian Ronald Blythe. I can’t imagine that the people tell the stories as well as Cusk tells them, and I thought the same about the stories in Blythe’s Akenfield. I’m not sure if I’m reading fiction or non-fiction, but I don’t need to know. This story, summarising women’s lives almost brutally, is told by an elegant Greek author wearing silver, high-heeled sandals in a restaurant that she thinks beneath her. ‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of…