Portrait of the Artist as a Movie Star

A few months ago, I traveled to a new city in a foreign country to talk about a book I’d written.

At lunch one day, my host told me about a publishing acquaintance of hers who’d hosted the writer Rachel Cusk some years back, only to find herself seemingly replicated later, in cartoonish and (she felt) unflattering form, within one of the books in Cusk’s Outline trilogy.

The woman was apparently devastated; although Cusk had withheld some details, the portrait, according to its presumptive subject, was specific and precise enough that anyone who knew her and read the book would immediately recognize the person being portrayed.

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is indefensible,” Janet Malcolm wrote in her classic 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer , about a nonfiction writer who used ethically questionable means to get close to a subject.

Does the same theory hold true for autofiction? The license that art allows is generous, which Cusk has learned to make use of.

On the occasions when she’s written openly autobiographical works, she’s been pilloried, or even sued: Her 2001 book about motherhood, A Life’s Work , was lambasted in the British press for its frank portrait of maternal self-abnegation, and her 2009 book The Last Supper sparked a libel lawsuit from a man who took issue with her depiction of him. (The publisher settled the suit and printed a revised version of the book.) But it was Cusk’s 2012 memoir about her divorce, Aftermath , and the excoriation she received for its exposure of supposed private family matters, that seemed to bring her to a breaking point.

“Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath ,” she told The Guardian two years after publication.

“That was the end.

I was heading into total silence—an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.” [ Read: The uncoupling ] Instead of retreating, she turned that silence into its own ingenious form.

Outline , published in 2014, is about a writer named Faye who’s traveling to Greece to teach creative writing, and its conceit is that Faye is an almost entirely passive vehicle for other people’s stories, which different characters spill out to her with unguarded enthusiasm.

The book and two following installments, Transit and Kudos , were categorized as novels, which offered more protection than Cusk had previously been allowed.

Still, Cusk made clear that what she was really interested in as a writer was truth—the resonance of pure reality.