But as soon as I start asking questions, she is bridling all over the place. "Oh Lynn," she sighs, "you can't seriously expect me to answer that." But then she apologises rather charmingly: "Part of what I thought would happen when I got my teaching job (she teaches creative writing at the Kingston University) is that I would become better at talking and it hasn't happened."
She is good at talking but when she talks about her novels, it often sounds like a literary seminar and absolutely nothing to do with her. I asked if her new novel, The Bradshaw Variations, represented some retraction of her previous feminist values, in that it is about a career wife and house-husband whose marriage deteriorates in the course of the book.
Cusk tosses her head up and snorts: "I guess that's what the publishers mean when they say on the proof, ‘Many topics for book group discussion.' I wondered what that meant." She has a fine contempt for book groups, having been to one once where everyone kept threatening to resign until she left. But then she has a fine contempt for many things. It is this fury that gives her books their characteristic energy and black humour.
Behind the mask
It is difficult to see where Cusk's discontent comes from when, on the face of it, she has had the cushiest of lives. However, Rachel Cusk is not one for counting her blessings. She hates what she calls the "cheer up, love" school of criticism that asks why she has to be so angry all the time. Unfortunately, it's the question always hovering on my lips. Someone actually asks it of the heroine of her fourth novel, The Lucky Ones (2003), and she says she is angry about "men. Marriage. Children. I don't know, everything". That seems to sum up Cusk. She sees herself as embattled, hounded by critics, loathed by other mothers, attacked with slings and arrows from every side.
All this started with the book she wrote about motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, in 2001. It is an excoriating account of the horrors of pregnancy.
Many mothers were outraged by the book and accused her of hating her child, though others were secretly grateful that someone had articulated their own worst feelings.
But she says she now almost wishes she hadn't written it because: "It has caused me so much grief. I think it has sort of labelled me ... that I'm incredibly critical of everything and sort of miserable."
This impression was compounded by her last novel, Arlington Park, which seemed to express a hatred of almost all aspects of family life. After Arlington Park, she published a travel book, The Last Supper, which begins with a quotation from D.H. Lawrence: "Comes over one an absolute necessity to move", which is an urge Cusk obviously shares because she is always moving house. Since adulthood, she has lived in London, Oxford, Exmoor, Bristol, Italy and now Brighton, but is beginning to get itchy feet again. "I like Brighton but it's because of my peripatetic childhood, I guess."
Always on the move
Even as a child, she realised that her parents' urge to move was not quite rational "I felt they moved to escape feelings of unhappiness" and has reluctantly come to see the same in herself.
But she also thinks that writers should move, should travel, seek new experiences. Cusk has always been a writer. She wrote poetry as a child and started her first novel the minute she left Oxford. "I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened."
But what did happen to her in childhood? Why does she say she was so unhappy all the time? She recently admitted, in the introduction to a new edition of A Life's Work: "I have a bad relationship with my mother and was pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion." She once said: "I came wrathful from the womb." But, again, why? "I didn't feel accepted."
Didn't she ever, even once, have the feeling that she was getting enough attention, that the world was at her feet? "I did, I suppose, in my late twenties, when I'd published two books, had my own house in London and could support myself, I was free but then I decided that that wasn't what I was looking for. ... There's this really good line in Women in Love where Ursula says, ‘I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' I think that's what a lot of people feel that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can. But to me, there is no moral difference between happiness and unhappiness. I just want to describe them, that's all I'm interested in. But that's why I resent this miserablist label, because I'm not happy or unhappy, I am just interested in different states and how they feel."
- Guardian News and Media Limited
