Rachel Cusk

Author Rachel Cusk began her career writing traditional novels that won high praise and awards. Then she published a series of raw, unsentimental memoirs about motherhood, family life, and divorce that shocked readers, especially in England, where the Canadian-born author has lived much of her life. She followed up with three novels, the Outline trilogy (2014–18), that dismantled conventional approaches to plot and characterization and erased the boundary between fiction and autobiography. Critics called the trilogy groundbreaking, but Cusk was not done turning the art of fiction writing upside-down.

In 2026 Cusk published her most controversial work yet, Life of M, a novel that examines fame, celebrity culture, and the precariousness of identity. Many critics believed it was a thinly veiled biography of actress Natalie Portman. Some accused Cusk of going too far with her experimentation, calling the book a “literary assassination.” Cusk defended her work, telling The New York Times,

What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness. And if my job is not to go into unexplored areas of contemporary consciousness, then I don’t know what it is.

Background and first novels

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, to English parents and spent her early years in Los Angeles. When she was seven her family returned to England, where Cusk was educated at St Mary’s Convent, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Cambridge. The second of four children, Cusk had a strained relationship with her parents. She had asthma and allergies and took solace in writing poetry, but she has said that her family had an “intolerance of sensitivity and emotion.” Cusk studied English at New College, Oxford, earning a degree in 1988. Years later she told The Guardian, “Leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job—I just couldn’t. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying.”

In 1993 she published her first book, Saving Agnes, which centers on a middle-class, suburban-raised woman who works as an editor at a trade magazine in London. It received the Whitbread Award (later called the Costa Book Award) for first novel. Two years later she published The Temporary, another novel set in the London publishing world that satirizes modern romance and work life. Her next book, The Country Life (1997), follows a Londoner who leaves behind city life to work as an au pair for a family in a tiny village in Sussex. The work was honored with a 1998 Somerset Maugham Award.

Memoirs

For her next book Cusk turned to memoir, writing A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) after she had given birth to her first child and while she was pregnant with her second. Unsparing in its views of the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and parenting, the book contains such candid statements as “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like.” A Life’s Work was met with furor by many British readers, especially mothers. Cusk was accused of being a selfish child-hater, although critics thought the book was a powerful and honest statement about motherhood.

In 2009 she published The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, an account of Cusk’s three-month getaway in Italy with her husband and children and the art, food, and people they encountered during their travels. Soon after its release, Cusk was sued by one of the people mentioned in the book, who recognized himself based on Cusk’s description. All remaining copies of the first printing were subsequently pulped in Britain. The uproar continued with her next memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), which chronicles the breakdown of her relationship with her second husband, photographer Adrian Clarke. Like A Life’s Work, the book held nothing back in detail about Cusk’s animosities. Many critics found Aftermath puzzling. In The Sunday Times, reviewer Camilla Long called Cusk “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish.”

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Outline trilogy, “autofiction,” and “anti-novels”

In the meantime Cusk continued to write novels, including The Lucky Ones (2003), In the Fold (2005), Arlington Park (2006), and The Bradshaw Variations (2009). Like her early fiction they center on upper-middle-class Brits, domestic life, and the travails and pretensions of modern society. But critics detected the first inklings of Cusk’s later experimentation, as she began to dispense with formal plots. Arlington Park, which follows a group of suburban mothers, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize (now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction).

In 2014 Cusk tried something radically different. In interviews she cited the backlash against her memoirs, especially Aftermath, as ushering in a “creative death.” She told The Guardian, “My mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.” But public rancor also inspired her to experiment with that form. “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character—these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.”

The result was Outline, a novel packed with long, often philosophical conversations between the narrator, a divorced middle-aged writer named Faye who travels to Athens to teach a creative writing course, and the people she meets. The book is largely plotless with little characterization beyond what the speakers reveal in their monologues, which are mostly filtered through Faye’s narrative rather than presented as dialogue. Outline was published to rave reviews and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

Two years later Cusk published a sequel, Transit, in which Faye has moved to London with her children after her divorce. Once again the book is made up of conversations she has with, among others, an ex-boyfriend, a real estate agent, a student who has become fixated on the art of Marsden Hartley, and a pair of immigrant builders working on the crumbling property Faye has purchased. Between these encounters Faye deals with vitriol from her cranky downstairs neighbors. In 2018 Cusk released Kudos, in which Faye travels to a literary festival in southern Europe.

Although there are a few differences between Cusk and her narrator (Cusk has daughters, whereas Faye has sons), critics noted enough similarities to classify her trilogy as “autofiction,” a genre that blends autobiography with fiction. Some have called her later books “anti-novels.” In keeping with Cusk’s views (she has said, “I don’t think character exists anymore”), the speakers in the Outline trilogy use similar language and diction, regardless of their backgrounds. Among the critics who questioned this approach was The New Yorker’s Becca Rothfeld, who asked, “Is it the height of narcissistic self-magnification to suppose that the universal voice sounds so much like your own—and therefore that the universal voice speaks only from well-appointed rentals on the Mediterranean?”

Cusk’s experimentation continued with Second Place (2021), a novel about a woman who offers the use of her family’s guesthouse to a famous artist. Both of them are identified only by their first initials. In Parade (2024), which intertwines vignettes about several artists and various other people, all the characters are simply named “G.”

Life of M

The controversy over Cusk’s Life of M began before the novel’s publication in August 2026, with speculation that its actress character, M, was based on Natalie Portman. Like the real-life star of such films as Black Swan, M is a former child actor whose film roles include a ballerina who descends into madness. Rumors abounded that Portman, who has met Cusk and recommended one of her books for her book club, felt betrayed. Portman actually released no statement, and many critics noted that Cusk’s novel is more of an intentionally disorienting examination of the artifices of self and celebrity than a tell-all roman à clef. In an interview with The New York Times, Cusk suggested that writing the novel was a way to “pause being myself and to have some vacation from myself.” She said, “It was like, what would it be like to be able to lose yourself or leave yourself, and is that what the celebrity offers?”

Other works and personal life

Cusk’s other books include the essay collection Coventry (2019) and an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (2015).

Cusk was briefly married to a banker before meeting her second husband, Adrian Clarke. That marriage lasted about 10 years and the couple had two children. She then wed painter Siemon Scamell-Katz, with whom she lives in France.