Aftermath
On Marriage and Separation
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fearless and transformative exploration of divorce's impact on women's lives
In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women.
Aftermath is an unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed—"a jigsaw dismantled". With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with acuity and wit. Unlike any other book written on the subject, Aftermath discovers opportunity as well as pain in the experience of divorce.
Through vivid, personal narratives and insightful essays, this memoir offers a thought-provoking examination of divorce's complex place in our society. Cusk's autobiographical writing will resonate with anyone who has gone through a marriage separation or is interested in family life and women's experiences. This timely and important book from the acclaimed British author will help readers understand their own journeys of love, loss, and resilience.
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.
