It has now been more than ten years since Rachel Cusk told an interviewer at the Guardian, “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” The book Cusk was promoting at the time, her 2014 novel Outline, wasn’t quite autobiography, though neither was it wholly fiction: it was an attempt to reconcile her sense that pure fiction was “fake and embarrassing” with the harsh response to her recent memoirs, which had been so bitter and personal (one subject of 2009’s The Last Supper had sued her). “My mode of autobiography had come to an end,” Cusk explained. “I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.”
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