Rachel Cusk (born 8 Feb 1967) is a UK-based Canadian-born novelist and writer. Read full biography of Rachel Cusk →
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.
I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the... →
If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption - even the... →
It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding... →
I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould... →
Rachel Cusk (born 8 Feb 1967) is a UK-based Canadian-born novelist and writer.