Aftermath
On Marriage and Separation 'Cusk breaks all the rules' Independent
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
'An extraordinary writer of the female experience.' Financial Times
'Cusk is startlingly insightful.' Independent on Sunday
'What keeps you reading, hungrily, is the violent precision of her writing . . . Divorce has been a catastrophe for Cusk but Cusk the writer triumphs.' Metro
In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recently separated from her husband, British novelist and memoirist Cusk (A Life's Work) chronicles the upheaval that follows divorce in a probing style that lays bare the divorce's impact on herself and her family. At a Christmas service with her two young children, she feels their vulnerability exposed. No longer an intact family, they now "belong more to the world in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom." Cerebral and unsentimental, 40-something Cusk reveals her insights about gender roles, feminism, motherhood, and religion. In her marriage, she strove for equality, with she and her husband living together as two hybrids, each of them "half male and half female." During her divorce, she finds resonance in the ancient Greek dramas their tempestuous world of feeling and fate feel truer to her than the stories of the holy family in Christianity. Feeling in exile from her own history, she says she no longer has a life. "It's an afterlife," she tells a friend, an aftermath, which means a second harvest a life with knowledge of what has gone before. Interspersed within the narrative are stories within stories, vivid scenes, and piercing observations. In this thought-provoking memoir, Cusk musters her considerable literary powers to mine a complex terrain filled with heartbreak and doubt.
