Author

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

From Rachel Cusk

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

From Rachel Cusk

I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.

From Rachel Cusk

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

From Rachel Cusk

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

From Rachel Cusk

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.

From Rachel Cusk

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

From Rachel Cusk

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

From Rachel Cusk

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

From Rachel Cusk

The anorexic is out to prove how little she needs, how little she can survive on; she is out, in a sense, to discredit her nurturers, while at the same time making a public crisis out of her need for nurture. Such vulnerability and such power: it brings the whole female machinery to a halt.

From Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk

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