Against ‘Women’s Writing’

In Outline, the first book in Rachel Cusk’s astonishing trilogy of novels, the narrator, Faye, has dinner in Athens with a celebrated feminist author. Angeliki apologizes for arriving late: She has only just escaped from a reception plus a quick detour to put her son to bed. She has been away from him, she says, as a consequence of her international book tour. Her novel, which concerns a painter who feels torn between her children and her desire to be free, is very popular in Poland, where she met a journalist whose lifeless egalitarian marriage had left her so ugly and serious that she was barely recognizable as a woman at all. Angeliki has discovered that her own husband and son do not need her the way she once thought they did, and this distance from their need has made her reconsider her own freedom. She does not want childbirth to be her greatest act of creation, but neither does she wish to become a desexed professional who loses touch with her female essence. The painter in her novel fails to resolve this dilemma, ultimately diverting all her artistic energy to her children.