The style & technique of RACHEL CUSK
She’s written ten novels and four works of non-fiction. Initially seen as a feminist novelist, she caused a furore with autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce. Her most recent novels have been categorised as autofiction (fictionalised autobiography), a genre associated mainly with contemporary French authors.
How she began
Born in Canada to British parents, Rachel Cusk spent her early childhood in Los Angeles. Her family moved to the UK in 1974 when she was eight and eventually settled in Bury St Edmunds. The change from sundrenched California to the wet world of England was a big shock: ‘my whole system was hit by this juggernaut of sensory stuff and it had the most amazing effect,’ she later said. She went to St Mary’s Convent, a Catholic boarding school in Cambridge, and then to New College, Oxford, where she read English.
She wrote poetry as a child and started
