I attended a reading once where Mary Gaitskill was asked by an eager MFA type about whether her being “famous” had any bearing on her ability to go out into the world, accruing experience to be turned into material. Gaitskill, as I recall, laughed and said something to the effect of: writers aren’t really famous; unless you’re Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, or, I don’t know, Stephen King, people don’t care. I’m not sure Rachel Cusk would agree with that position. I don’t mean for straightforward reasons of bigheadedness, but rather that what Cusk shares with the very famous is a wounded sense of having been exposed, something she continues to fold back into her work.
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