Second Place, Cusk says, is intended as a “tribute” to Luhan with Lawrence figured as the painter M. Lawrence stayed with her in Taos, New Mexico. The inspiration for Second Place came when Cusk was researching a magazine article on artists colonies and discovered arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos about the time D.H. Am I just going to repeat myself? Is that what people do at 54? Do they realise that their generative state is over? And that either they just repeat and do the same things over again, or have to face quite a massive task of questioning and, not reinventing of the self, but asking questions of the self.” “I’m a 54-year-old woman, my children are going out into their own lives, and that blankness is very much a blankness of life as well.

The “great, white blank” she faced as a novelist after completing the trilogy, was also one she faced as a woman. Rachel Cusk’s new novel is about a writer M who invites the artist L to stay with her.įor Cusk, the problems of writing have continued to parallel the problems of living. The trilogy was an attempt to erase personal identity, or at least to give the self less space. Her raw and honest account of motherhood, A Life’s Work, in 2001 also proved provocative.

Her 2009 memoir, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, about a family holiday had to be recalled and pulped after a character in the book recognised himself and sued for libel. It wasn’t the first time her autobiographical work attracted ire. His presence is disruptive, setting in motion a chain of events that reveal how rebirth and destruction are often one and the same.Ĭusk has spoken about how the Outline trilogy phoenixed from the “creative death” she experienced after publishing her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, which drew criticism for its intimate and unrelentless examination of her divorce from photographer Adrian Clarke. M feels herself “falling out of the frame she has lived in for years” and becomes enthralled by L, convinced he can restore her to visibility, that he has the power to enable her to see herself clearly so she can say “I am here”.

It’s a simple but seductive set-up: the female writer M invites the male artist L to stay in the “second place” she has built on the secluded marshland property where she lives with her partner Tony. The result is Second Place, her first novel since she finished the Outline trilogy, and a return to plot and protagonist, albeit in a very Cuskian way. And I didn’t know whether a direction would come out of that, or could come out of that, and I had to just wait and see what happened in my thinking.” “There was so much about stripping away and dismantling, and I’d almost reduced it to the ground.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk