Backlisted - Transit and the Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Something a little different this week. Andy, Una and Nicky discuss the novel Transit by Rachel Cusk, the second part of her award-winning Outline trilogy. Outline, the first volume was published in 2014, with Transit following two years later and then finally Kudos in 2018; our conversation encompasses all three books. Backlisted began not long after Outline was published, and in the time we’ve been on air, the novels have gone from being well-reviewed new titles to bestsellers to backlist classics. When the history of early 21st-century literature is written, Rachel Cusk may well be cited as the figure responsible for taking the genre of autofiction into the mainstream. All three of us have a distinctly different relationship to these novels and we thought it might be illuminating to spend a hour or so comparing notes. Good news: it was! We hope you enjoy listening to us talking about reading books about people talking about writing books about people talking about books, as much as we enjoyed talking about them.  *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we start, a big thank you to serious readers for supporting backlisted. Yes, people always ask how we keep up with the reading. I usually say 1.5 speed audio books and mild panic. And I say, well, I keep up with it with the health of my serious readers light. It's the one thing that can make hours of reading feel easy. Because it's not just a lamp. It's a precision tool that replicates natural daylight to stop squinting and ice drain. These lights are recommended by over 500 opticians and I can see

The good news is listeners can get £150 off any HD essential reading light with free UK delivery at Seriousreaders.com forward slash back. Just use the code back at the checkout. That's BACK. And it comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. That's seriousreaders.com forward slash back with the code BACK. And now on with the show. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, a podcast which gives new life to old books. The novel featured on today's show is Transit by Rachel Cusk, the second part of the author's Outline Trilogy, first published in 2016 by Jonathan Cape in the UK, and the following year by Farah Strauss and Giroux in the US.

Inevitably, our discussion today will also encompass the first volume, outline, published in 2014, and the final instalment, Kudos, published by Faber and Faber in 2018. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventry, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr. Una McCormack, award-winning author of Speculative Fictions and Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. Hello, and they've let me back. Nikki Birch, the producer and editor of Backlisted. Welcome back, everyone.

Okay, now, let's turn to today's featured title. When the history of auto fiction is written, perhaps the defining literary genre of the early 21st century, the work of Rachel Cusk is bound to feature prominently. Well, the three books we're talking about today, outline, transit and kudos, form a trilogy that cover several years in the life of a writer, known to us only by her first name, Faye. Across the course of these three

volumes, Faye teaches on a creative writing course in Athens, she moves house in London, and she goes to Lisbon for a literary festival. The substance of each novel, and I hesitate to call it the action, focuses on the conversations Faye

has with the people around her, the man sitting next to her on the plane, an interviewer for a literary TV program, a fellow tutor on the course and many other writers. Fay is adept at getting others to reveal themselves whilst telling us really very little about herself. But we do see her quietly, almost imperceptively, go through a divorce, buy and renovate a house, remarry, and mother her two sons. Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She went to school in Cambridge and University in Oxford.

Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993 and promptly won the Whipred First Novel Prize. In 2003, she appeared in Granta's list of the 20 best young British novelists. Her intake that year also included Monica Alley, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. But in 2001, Cusk had published her first work of non-fiction, A Life's Work, on becoming a mother, and arguably it was this book that both set her apart from her contemporaries and brought her to wider public attention. At the time, I worked for the publisher of a life's work, and I can confirm that the book caused an uproar, one for which few people were prepared. 10 years later, aftermath on marriage and separation achieved much the same effect.

Perhaps these memoirs, highly personal, precisely written and remorselessly honest in their author's assessments of motherhood and the married state, laid the groundwork for the outline trilogy, a sequence widely acknowledged to have redefined what a novel can be. And here's the twist. These experimental books, the appeal of which, in the words of Spinal Tap, seems inherently selective, without much in the way of plot or particularly likable characters, have all gone on to become international bestsellers. So why are we talking about Rachel Cusk on backlisted? After all, she isn't neglected, and it seems unlikely she would appreciate being referred to as a lady novelist.

Well, we felt it would be interesting to treat books that were published as Frontlist in the lifetime of this podcast as the significant backlist titles they have subsequently become. Outline, transit and kudos are not merely books about books, the best kind, as regular listeners will know, but books about the world of books and what writers are obliged to do when they are not writing. They travel, teach, appear at literary festivals and so on. Neither Faye nor Rachel Cusk have yet appeared as a guest on a podcast devoted to old books, but the century is still young.

Well, each of us brings something very different to the text, label. And unusually, my role in this, I would say is somebody who hadn't read, I say unusually, sarcastically. I hadn't read Rachel Cusk until we decided to do this episode. And I wonder also if I had read Rachel Cusk, whether I would remember that I'd read Rachel Cusk. But that's not to say that the books, they're not giving away what I think about the books, but I just wonder if I would. I mean, the first book was published in 2014, but some of the other books, the other two books, Transit and Kudos, were published in the lifetime of backlisted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we have been talking about books while these books have been written. And I think that's interesting that they haven't come up

before, admittedly, you know, in the what have I been reading slots or anything like that. Una, what's your relationship to Rachel Cusk? So, I'm Well, to this trilogy, I'd read them as they were being published in paperback, I think, and I read them again for this show. So the first book of hers I read was A Life's Work. And that's because when I was teaching creative writing, my colleague and dear friend Collette Paul and I, we both went on maternity leave at the same time.

And Collette is a huge fan of Cusk and recommended that I read that book. And I had mixed reactions to the book. We can come on to this. So I think it's significant to the backstory of the. novels. But then after I quit my job, I could tell you exactly when I read Outline, because I've got the receipt as a bookmark. I bought it in September 2019, along with Crudow and another book on a three for two. And then I read them in paperback. And I loved Outline because it's about teaching creative writing. And I was ready for a book that was about skewering teaching creative

writing. So it landed at just the right minute and then I read the rest of them. Okay, so in the casting for this episode then, everyone, Una is here representing both literary theory and practice. Oh my God. Nikki is what? I'm the older woman. No, Nikki is what Elizabeth Hurley once referred to as non-celebrities. She refers to them as civilians. So Nikki is here is our civilian, the voice of the civilian. I read outline when it first came out and I bought it in Oxford. I have a first edition copy, which apparently is now worth some money, so that's pleasing to know.

And I bought it intending to read it, to talk about it on an early episode of that listed in the what I've been reading this week's slot. And that came a cropper when I read the book and disliked it intensely. And so it's been both mortifying and instructive to consider for this show what I may have missed 10 years ago and to catch up with phase subsequent adventures in transit and kudos. And I just thought, well, you know, this would be such for the exact, the reasons Nikki outlines it'd be so interesting to talk about novels that are considered some of the most important in literary terms in the era we've been on air from our different

points of view and with 250 more shows are backlisted in our lives than we had in my case when I when I last read outline and just see what we make of them now you know what is the nature of Rachel Cusk's achievement in these novels why have they resonated with so many readers? To me, I could think about that for days. Yeah. And also, Nikki, crucially, when can we reasonably expect the musical adaptation?

Well, when we come back, we'll hear from Fay herself, in the person of Kristen Scott Thomas. But first, a message from our sponsors. Before the flight, I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire, I'd been promised to have liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing

that could help organisations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up. Unfortunately, I had to leave before he arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase. The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unrepossessingly and ended obviously with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today.

I wondered whether, in fact, what he wanted now was to be a writer, with the literary magazine as his entree. A lot of people want to be writers. There was no reason to think that you couldn't buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in and out of a great many things. He mentioned a scheme he was working on to eradicate lawyers from people's personal lives. He was also developing a blueprint for a floating wind farm, big enough to accommodate the entire community of people needed to service and run it.

The gigantic platform could be located far out to sea, thus removing the unsightly turbines from the stretch of coast, where he was hoping to pilot the proposal and where, incidentally, he owned a house. On Sundays, he played drums in a rock band just for fun. He was expecting his 11th child, which wasn't as bad as it sounded when you consider that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala. I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines.

He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi, he said, enjoy yourself in Athens. though I didn't remember telling him that was where I was going. Oh, that's, I mean, could you ask for a more exquisite pairing of reader and text? Yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. Yeah. That sign of dispassionate weariness. Yep.

Which is the tone of much of this work. I think that is one of the best audiobook readings I've ever heard, I would say. I think it's absolutely tremendous. And it's still, and I think this is a very important thing to say about these books at the outset, it is unbelievably funny. Well, what you've just heard there are the opening few paragraphs of the first novel in the trilogy Outline from 2014. Many of you will have read it already, but anyone listening to this now in the tradition has now started reading Outline. We have passively helped you do that. You have now read the first couple of pages of the first novel in this trilogy.

And we chose them simply because they are representative. That's very much what you're going to get for the next 650, 700 pages. And so my first question to Una in the light of what you were saying earlier, Una, is you wanted something that was going to skewer creative writing. Did you find, when you read that for the first time, did you find it relatable? I did indeed find it, quote, relatable. Relatable, yeah. And I continue to find it relatable.

So there are many things that are brilliant. Outline is my favourite of the trilogy, actually. But there are many things that I find brilliant about it. And there's a couple of lines, though, which I think are just zingers. what he wanted was to be a writer. A lot of people want to be a writer. Yeah. That she's doing this with a billionaire is absolutely brilliant

because I don't have a lot of lunches with billionaires, but I do, in the course of some of my activities, meet some highly accomplished people who do things like adopt quadruplets from Guatemala. And I often find myself observing people who are associated, with artistic practice in some way, as may be donors or gatekeepers, but are not practitioners, yeah? And so I often feel there's a desire to be close to the magic, but no practice of the magic, or perhaps the risk wasn't run to professionalise. And the last thing I'll say, just before I shut up, because I could bang on about outline just for the next 50 minutes. It's an incredibly,

And here's another word in putting quotes. It's incredibly teachable book. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Why is that? So, well, that paragraph or I could probably, you could open any, any two pages in, I think, the whole trilogy. And you would have a little master class in scene setting, narrative control, point of view, filter of information.

And that's not even getting onto questions. And one of the most enduring the interesting questions, which is the distance between the narrator, the author, the reader, and the implied ones of all of those. So just that, there is a set piece in a creative writing seminar towards the end of outline, which is just hilarious, just so funny. Funny because it's true. Funny because it's true, but also it's so well-crafted

because it's not really very similitude at all. It reminds me the Council of Elrond in Lord of the Rings, which is lots of voices. And now I shall tell a long story about my hound. Have you noticed, Nikki, how Middle Earth is to Una, what Croydon is to me on this show? Yeah, it comes up a lot. Yeah, I have. Edit that. One of the enjoyable challenges of making this episode of Backlisted is I have certain

privileged behind-the-scenes information. I've never met Rachel Cusk, but I know. know people who've worked with her, and I know people who were working at Faber when Outline was first published. And I don't think it's giving too much information away to say that within the two pages we just listened to, guys, there is already an in-joke, which is that the head of Faber and Faber, when this novel was published, played drums in a rock band on Sundays for fun. So literary historians make a note of that.

That's a verified fact about the introduction of this particular novel. Look, before, I'm going to say my favourite of the three is Transit, the second volume, which I found the most compassionate. of the three. Compassionate in general rather than compassionate towards specific groups. But even within that, there were things that kind of put my back up a little bit, which we might talk about. But I would like to echo some of what Una was saying there about the craft here. Do you think we could explain to people who haven't read or haven't read about this book, the style a little bit, because I think that would help and how it's a series

of interactions, all three of the books, sorry, there are a series of interactions that the writer has with people and in doing so. Look, I'll just read the blurb on the back of outwife. That's probably better than my go. No, no, no, no. Someone in a marketing department had to spend valuable time and energy coming up with this, Nick. You don't have to do it on the fly. Let's salute them and the work they do. Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is one of the reasons we played that

Kristen Scott Thomas extract early was so that the tone of voice listen to or written is in your heads, listeners, so that there is a kind of, what would you say, a lack of affect. Yeah, it's affectless, isn't it? It's almost blank, but not blank. There's a kind of, it's observational. yet quietly opinionated at the same time.

And sometimes those opinions are so recessed. They're practically invisible. But still they're there. But they're all there in the adjective chosen or in a selection of materials. Supposed passivity, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, so here is the blurb from the current edition of Outline.

I might just then segue into the blurb on the back of transit. it. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves. their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great loss.

Outline is the first book, in a short and yet epic cycle. A masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. A woman on a plane listens to the stranger in the seat next to hers telling her the story of his life, his work, his marriage, and the harrowing night he has just spent burying the family dog. That woman is Faye, who is on her way to Europe to promote the book she has just published. I'll pause it there. I think, Nikki, people will get the idea at this point. Yeah.

You know, are we or are we not reading a novel by a successful middle-aged, female novelist about the life of a successful female middle-aged novelist. To what extent is it based on her own life? To what extent, Asuna suggested, are we being encouraged to enjoy the uncertainty and ambiguity there? So let's ask you, Nikki, woman on a bike. What did you make of these? I think ultimately I really enjoyed them so I just put that out that might you know if I walk away I really really enjoyed them

and I'm really pleased that I have read them it was one of those authors who I kind of knew was important didn't really know why so I think yeah thank you first for making me read them I really was struck by that passivity and how do we form opinions on people? And I really love the fact that you're not presented with the narrator's story and yet through the conversations of other people,

you understand the narrator or you begin to understand the narrator. And yes, she has some interactions and she's a lightly sewn in throughout the book, but really, and you're sort of hoping for more and more, particularly in transit where there's a section where she has, she's doing some building work and she's fallen out with her neighbour. and you kind of want to know more. You want her to go downstairs and have a word with the neighbour and find out more. But it doesn't.

It really leaves you kind of hanging. And actually, that wanting more I found is actually, I found that quite addictive. You know, I really, yeah, I did. I really enjoyed that. And it made me kind of be more of a better listener because I listened to Kristen Todd Thomas because I was then, I wanted to understand more about her and why she's written like that. I didn't know about Rachel Cusk, and then I kind of started to listen to a lot more interviews and did a background reading, and I realised that these books should be seen in the body of her entire work,

and, you know, because she's done memoirs. Because it's all one song. Yeah, and I think to understand that, the context of why she's written these, the outpouring after aftermath of kind of and as you said the book about motherhood some people didn't like it, some people felt she exposed herself too much made you realise why she's gone down this route which is I'm still having an autobiographical story

but I'm doing it in a very different way which is perhaps safer for me Nikki I'm going to ask you a simple yet difficult question just answer as quickly as you can I think Yeah. So you said all that. You said you really enjoyed them. You said you felt they were addictive and you wanted to learn more and you kind of got pulled into it. Did you find, as novels, did you find them inclusive or exclusive?

As a woman who is 49 years old and has children who are growing up, I found that it worked for me. It was inclusive for me. And it talks a lot about our place in society as a woman and the expectations that women have as being successful in work and also as parents and difficulties around relationships. I found that work for me. I wouldn't necessarily say that's inclusive,

but I found it relatable. I want to just, thank you so much, Nikki. That is a tricky question to answer. I would say I found, okay, I need to say, this is important that I say this. There's three of us here. Two of us are women and one of us, me, is a man. But I am not speaking for men. My views are the views of Andy Miller. I found them, and I'm going to bounce this question to you in a minute. I found them and the thing that really put me off to start with and the thing I had to get past,

I found them exclusive that I thought I was going to be reading an attempt to transcribe a universal experience and after reading all three of the books of course they have huge merit but their merit is it exclusive it's a portrait of a particular type of person in a particular milieu of a particular class at a particular moment. And so I can, I'm very willing to

acknowledge elements of craft, innovation, all sorts of things. Where I come up against a barrier is the thought that a universal experience is being articulated. Is she, I mean, does she ever claim to be that? Certainly others have claimed it for her, and she has been willing to agree that she is articulating a universal experience. I feel like she articulates the kind of cold intellectual experience, not cold, but distant intellectual experience. And that definitely isn't universal. Universal, indeed. So, yeah, I think they are often extremely classic books in particular.

I think there's an undercurrent of transit in particular is a kind of undercurrent of distaste for the neighbours who are working class. I think, aren't they shock horror living in a council house? Which, you know, imagine such a horror. Aren't they referred to as trolls at one point? Yeah, they live beneath her. And here's the hall of mirrors, Una, right?

Well, yes, here's the end to the hall of mirrors. Right. So is that an accurate? depiction of someone who just doesn't like common people? Yeah, right, or is it? And therefore, is it artistically truthful? Yes, all of these things. It accurately, you know, you could, I imagine I could, I could wander down streets close by to where I live and hear similar things said, and indeed I have. So it's a very accurate representation of a certain milieu. Whether it represents the

views of the author, I'm not even sure that matters. Andy Millier, by the way. Universal, Andy Milleur. Una, you came up with a brilliant phrase in relation to these novels and in relation to Rachel Cust's achievement when I said earlier, what is her achievement in this? You can't with a perfect phrase. Please share it with people. So what I find quite interesting about trying to talk about these books

is that I think the book kind of anticipates what you're going to say. And not just that. The phrase I used was, I think that the books are daring you to critique them. Yes. You're right. Go on. They are because she's been critiqued so much from the aftermath, right? So she's like, yeah, go on, critique me here, and the life's work, exactly.

And either I will loop you into the next book, yeah, or don't think I haven't thought it's already. The books are sort of anticipating what you will say about them. She actually says that the outline trilogy and aftermath is all the same. It's just about different ways of projecting our memories. It's no different. And I think that they are really, but this way she's spinning that kind of hurt, I guess, that she got off the back of the Christism and going, fuck you. It's so English using understatement, wit and class to battle the rest of the world.

and the sadness within it and the energy within it that's one reason why Kristen Scott Thomas is such a brilliant piece of casting. I think it's using all those things to shore up whatever position exists, yeah? Whatever hold you've got in that hierarchy. I think it uses those, that wit and distance

and intellectual power and social capital. It's using that to maintain a certain kind of social structure, a position, social position, perhaps. Like I say, I think the book always anticipates what you're going to say about it. Well, later in the show, we will take a look at a very positive review written by Tessa Hadley and a less positive review of kudos written by Sally Rooney when that novel was published in 2018. But why don't we listen now to Rachel discuss herself now talking in 2019. about some of just the nuts and bolts about how she wrote these books? I wrote an outline in three weeks.

Oh my God. That's criminal. It nearly killed me. No, when I'm ready to write a book, you know, I know everything about it. So writing is literally writing it down. Heavily outlined, storyboarded or restructured very clearly or written intuitively? No, I know everything that I'm going to do. You know, all the encounters that say is when you have.

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. But I've usually held that in my head rather than, I mean, I got very used to looking up, you know, being the mother of children and not being able to write when I wanted to. I got very used to holding enormous amounts of prose in my head. And that, you know, even though they're older now, I kind of still work like that. So that's actually from a podcast. Well, there's a recording of this interview on a podcast called City Arts and Lectures. And Rachel Cust there is talking to Stephen Wynne at the Sydney Goldstein Theatre in San Francisco.

It's a really interesting conversation, and we'll hear a couple more excerpts from that later in the show. But, Una, I know you had something to say about that specific way of working there. I completely relate to that. I've written a book in three weeks. It was slightly shorter than outline. It wasn't as technically accomplished. but this is exactly how I work as well, that I hold the whole thing in my head until the last possible moment.

I usually write books in about eight, eight to ten weeks. I'm usually miserable for about six months beforehand. I tend to get a really bad headache. And then as I write the book, the headache starts to dissipate as my brain downloads the text. But the thing she says about writing when you have small children, exactly how I did it. I would have 20 minutes in between a student meeting and a lecture and I would go, right, if I use 17 of these minutes, I can get down about five, 600 words of today's word count and I'll still have time to get to class.

And that's exactly exactly how I was probably at my most productive in the run-up to my kid going to school because you just took the time. Wow. My experience, though not identical, is not dissimilar to that when my son was young and I was doing probably not half the child care, but let's award myself a 40% number. Yeah, that suddenly the time available to you to be creative. Or something self-centered, not self-centered, but self-centered, whether that is, you know, to do with work, which is life.

Life is work, meaningful work. I think she captures something very true there. So, Nikki, for me, one of the things reading these books that I admire greatly is the sheer nerve of it. Why is that? This is why I described in the introduction

as a twist. There is no way anyone went into that project thinking, We've got a bestseller on our hands here. The chutzpah, ding, of saying, my every thought will be worth recording and putting out in front of readers with little in the way of plot. I mean, basically no plot, a novel in ten conversations. What is it?

Is it hutzpah? Is it arrogance? Is it self-belief? Is it conceit? every word is loaded with a different meaning and it's all those things so many writers wouldn't have the nerve to to do what Rachel Cusk did here that those novels then went on to become international bestsellers yeah is is mind-blowing because they're also and I think this is very important because we're talking about in quite a highfalute in terms they are

incredibly readable and part of that I think is down down to their auditory quality. And you could be sitting on the bus just listening to somebody tell you these. I mean, this is the thing that happens to be very, very often when I'm on the bus. What's interesting to me reading all three books is actually in terms of the, we've sort of said, oh, they're the same each. They're not the same each time. And transit, she does an exceptionally interesting thing, which I think she does.

she doesn't do an outline both of you can contradict me but my sense was in transit she's moved that method on a little bit where what she does is she meets Faye meets a character she presents the character to us initially for laughs

she she will tend to emphasise something about their accent or the way they're dressed or their or their wealth their wealth or their lack of tact in how they speak to her. But then as each portrait continues, every single character, with maybe one or two exceptions,

is humanised to you, the reader. And I think it's revealing the characters to which Faye will reveal herself rather than just acting as a receptacle for their story. Sometimes Faye will elect to have a conversation with a person. And sometimes she'll go, actually, this is such great material. I'll just sit and listen to this. Do you think the reason why it's so readable is, effectively, it's 10 short stories. So you could read it as 10 short stories, conversations with different people about interesting things about their life.

Everybody's got something interesting about their life. But in doing so, as you go through the 10 short stories, you're unlocking. a little bit more information about Faye's life and how Faye feels about people and society. And don't forget the political climate that she's in at that time as well. Nikki, I'm going to bounce that back to you. Did you feel you were reading a book of short stories, or did you feel you were reading a novel? And if you felt you were reading a novel, why did you feel you were reading a novel? I felt the more I read the books consecutively, the more I understood Faye and as a character

and the more I was reading a novel. I think at the beginning it does feel like a series of short stories. So it's her developing persona, however quietly, that is the binding agent, as it were, that distinguishes these as novels rather than collections of linked short stories. Yes. If I were a little bit better educated and a bit more classically educated, I'd wonder. You're literally a Cambridge professor, Una. It doesn't get much better than that. I never had the Latin.

But I wonder how closely they mimic something like Greek plays or Greek tragedies. Because I think you get a series of speeches and then there will be sudden interruptions like the voice of faith. A chorus. A chorus, which is her son ringing her. Okay, interesting. bolts from something outside. And I suspect that they mirror those in quite interesting ways because they're not interested in plot.

They're not interested in things hanging together. She did actually in 2015 write or adapt Medea as a theatre production. So she's clearly, you've spotted that. She knows her stuff. We're going to take a break now. And when we come back, we'll hear from Rachel Cusk again talking about the tricky nature of imagination in fiction. The drift of language away from truth is incredibly problematic and it's almost the first

sign that something is seriously amiss in the sort of social fabric. I encountered that feeling as a writer in terms of the conventional contemporary novel, which seemed increasingly to disavow any connection to the self and personal experience. And, you know, to me, the need for the world to be verified to be able to say, I know this because I saw it, because I experienced it, is really the sort of correct moral position for any artist. And as I say, the novel has become a form in which making things up is highly valued and distancing oneself and disavowing and disowning your material and saying, you know, none of this is about me and none of this happened to me.

And, you know, these are all invented characters. It felt like something I wanted to completely turn away from. Well, Una McCormack, award-winning author of speculative fictions. Did I not mention that I've travelled in space on the Enterprise or these sorts of things? How else would you know? How else would I know, indeed? Who's she to say? No, I think that's the thing I'm going to be rolling around in my mind is that idea of the correct moral position for the artist.

Because I think it, I mean, it certainly acts as a kind of defence. of the two memoirs, doesn't it? This was what happened to me. If I did not record that faithfully and truthfully, then I would be not acting in a moral way. But everything's partial, isn't it? I've got a moral dilemma, and I'm not even joking right here. So, well, look, we have Rachel Kuss speaking there

with, to my mind, a certain degree of entitlement, and we could speculate as what that sense of entitlement derives from. Certainly in how she talks about herself and her work, it's the entitlement of the artist to tell the truth. And she says there the moral responsibility of the artist is to tell the truth to be able to free to say, quote, I know this because I saw it, or I know this because I experienced it. Well, as you know, Nikki, I myself am an artist.

working in the medium of the podcast. But I cannot tell the truth about things to do with the history of the publications of these books, because it would be considered inappropriate to do so. So I have a dilemma, I have a dilemma between my, in the terms Rachel Cusker self as just outlined it, no pun intended, I have a dilemma, right? The format here does not necessarily permit me to express what I want to. However, it does allow me, Nikki, don't worry, don't worry. It does allow me to ask a question. Why does nobody ever talk about the fact that outline was published by Faber and Faber? Two years later, Transit was published by Jonathan Cape.

a completely different publisher and then two years after that Kudos was published by Faber and Faber again. That's a terrible publishing choice to split a trilogy between two different publishers

going backwards and forwards is a bad decision. I think that's really interesting. I didn't know about the different publishing and I would agree that seems crazy. There's a truth. The truth that she's speaking is a slice of truth. It's not the whole truth.

It can never be the whole truth. Just like your experience of what you're seeing, you know, the format of backlisted, as you said, has always been to get the most positive sides of all books because otherwise we'd be here for 250 episodes slagging off books. And that's not the format of the show that we've chosen, right? Nicky, we've broken through into a new format called auto podcast. Auto podcast, yeah.

Where we're analysing what we're doing while we do it. But what I mean is, It's a, it's a, the truth that she's telling is that slice of it. And I don't think that means, it doesn't mean that she has to then talk about her publishing decisions or anything else. So I think, I think that's okay. But as Una says, she is daring us to discuss them from a quite high up position saying, well, of course, I choose the terms of the engagement, not you, which is fine.

That's what artists do. To make a claim about, uh, true. and access to truth based on experience and perception when the whole structure of the book and the way the books are written are the material she chooses to select are necessarily as a first person partial in some way and also invisibilize the structures and conditions in which the book can be made and built. I think it sort of gives the lie to that position. respect the position that says I am reporting honestly, as honestly and truthfully as I can, the things that happen to me.

And I think it's, I think it's an interesting position to take. But I don't believe that any particularly first person account, well, any account can be anything other than partial and a function of choices made in the creative process. Yeah, of course, of course. Do you think that the truth is, is, comes up quite a lot in this as well, because, or facts and things that she sort of feels like that, you know, the only facts you can trust are the ones that you know yourself because they're only your, my facts are different to Andy's facts are different to Una's fact. So if I had a conversation with that man on the

plane, I would have a different conversation and we'd have a, I'd understand him in a different way. You might find him terribly annoying, you know, or whatever, different aspects of their stories will affect you all in different ways. And I wonder if this is a, that sense of kind of facts and truth is all about the time it's sort of considered to be a i don't know if this is a phrase brexitian book uh you know or about you know it was about there's lots of references to leave or remain in uh transit isn't there divorce um the rise of sort of you sense the sort of populist kind of thing emerging and what are facts well the facts that you kind as i said a trust are the ones that you you bring yourself because do we start so it gets

into the COVID era a bit later where it's like, I mean, it's 2019, but that was the whole time we were talking about experts and facts. And so there is a sort of sense of she's saying, well, I don't necessarily believe other people. I believe myself and I'm just telling my story. And that's all I have. Yeah, yeah. I see that. I agree completely.

I would also like to take the opportunity if I may. We haven't actually read from it. there's a little bit here in kudos that I would absolutely love to read from few things which the anticipation of which has already given me so much pleasure to read these couple of pages on a podcast dedicated to a love of old books is I feel seen as the young people say I hate that phrase right I know I know but it's so Nikki it's so this is so good just don't trigger me Andy in terms of these are our noise

triggers. This is so good in terms of asking questions of not just the three of us, but to be honest, for you, everybody listening to this conversation now, this is what's so brilliant about her style. And while I read this, would you both think to yourself, okay, is this character who is Faye's one of Faye's European publishers? Is he voicing what he thinks, what Faye thinks, or what Rachel Cusk thinks? Okay. Okay? And you can't say, well, it's all three.

You must choose one. Okay. Here we go. People enjoy combustion, he exclaimed. In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion. not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years, but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty, anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.

It may be time itself, he exclaimed, that we are burning. For example, take the English writer Jane Austen. I have observed the way in which, over the space of a few years, the novels of this long-dead spinster were used up, he said, burned, one after another as spinoffs and sequels, films, self-help books, and even, I believe, a reality TV show. Despite the meagre facts of her life, even the author herself has finally been consumed on the pyre of popular biography. Whether or not it looks like preservation, he said. It is in fact the desire to use the essence until every last drop of it is gone.

Miss Austin made a good fire, he said. But in the case of my own successful authors, it is the concept of literature itself that is being combusted. Quite different hearing you say it than it is Christian Scott Thomas. It changes it. Yeah, right. But the sheer pleasure I derive from hearing he could be talking about podcasts there a cultural product that reproduced that ambiguous attraction while making no demands

and inflicting no pain in the service of it was bound to succeed like I say Nicky we feel seen even though we don't like that phrase critique that what was different about hearing me read it than hearing Chris and Scott Thomas read it

other than the obvious I think hey you brought a different kind of characterisation to him and perhaps hammed it up in quite a nice way that it may be trying to get it over for the listeners who are already in, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean no criticism, I liked it

I'd quite like you to do the rest of the book Andy I'm here, I'm here all night I was quite enjoying it. He did the police in different voices. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he's quoting Elliot because presumably the quote humankind cannot bear

very much reality, right? Well, I think I felt like a lot of this book, as you were saying, like there's little Easter eggs, people who knew Rachel Cusk or know her, but I also felt there's a lot there for people who do understand literature in a way that I don't, but that still doesn't make it inaccessible for me. So I do, you know, and I can still enjoy it. And that's actually a real pleasure. And having like you to sort of unlock little bits is like, oh, and I found doing the reading

around it really helpful. But that doesn't mean you can't. enjoy it straight up. Okay, so who is that character? Is it him? Is it phase processing of him? Yeah. Or is it cusk herself articulating via her character?

It feels like it's cussed, what she thinks. I think she tells you, in fact she does tell you her method of composition, and particularly character composition at the start of transit. So the very start of transit, the Faye receives an email from an astrologer, which is manifestly computer generated, yeah? Yeah, which allows her to ruminate on many things. And this, I think, is Cusk's commentary on character creation.

Listen for some of the Greek stuff in this as well. It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email, stroke text, had also generated the astrologer, herself. Her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often. She was too obviously based on a human type to be herself human. As a result, her sympathy and concern were slightly sinister, yet for those same reasons, they also seemed impartial. A friend of mine said there has been a great harvest of language and information from life,

and it may have become the case that the faux human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than one's fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface was the distillation not of one human, but of many. Many astrologers had had to live, in other words,

for this one example to have been created. What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. He recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him, the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt. Oh, it's so, you see, go on, critique that. Right, right.

It's so, Nikki, it's so infathing. furiously clever. It's so clever. Faber, if you want a quote for your cover, infuriatingly clever, Andy Miller. I think that's why some people, some people find her, they think, oh, it's too clever for me. I would say, if that's you, I would go back, like you did, Andy. Go back and have another go because actually it's worth the reread and to dig in deeper. I'm always being pompous and as people will be well aware and lecturing people about how they shouldn't be a prisoner of their own taste. And I don't see the value, honestly, of if I don't like a book and after 10 years of people bombarding me with alternative opinions of it, simply crossing my arms and going,

well, I'm not going to listen. I think if you're a serious reader and you want to learn something, you've got to squash your ego a bit and go, okay, well, I didn't get that. So let me another go and let me see if I can come at it from a different angle. There's nothing more likely to turn me off a book than a load of reviews, a load of kind of sound bites on it that say has revolutionised the novel form, never to be missed, a future classic. But they are, objectively, in my opinion, extremely good. Okay, can I ask you then, picking up on that,

what are the things in this book or these books, bearing in mind the first one was released in 2014, So in the last 11 years, what have they done that has moved the form on? Why are they so amazing? May I take this opportunity to read one paragraph from Tessa Hadley and one paragraph from Sally Rooney? Yes. Because, Nikki, they will answer your questions positively and negatively.

Tessa Hadley's review of transit begins. Rachel Cusk's new novel is tremendous. tremendous from its opening sentence. Cusk is always an exciting writer, striking and challenging with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash. One never feels her writing is trying to be liked, and in the past her memoirs of motherhood and of divorce have been both loved and hated by her readers because of what's abrasive and singular in them. In her last novel outline about a woman teaching creative writing in Greece and now in transit where the same woman, Fay, is back in London, making a new

life for herself after a separation from her husband, she has developed a radically new novel form that works triumphantly, I think, with just what's distinctive in her writing personality. So Tessa Hadley there is saying she's invented a form that can accommodate the strengths of her writing derived from her earlier novels which were more formal and then her experiences writing and crucially publishing a life's work and separation So she synthesized a new approach to fiction by the experience of both writing and publishing nonfiction. Does that answer partly answer your question? Yeah, I think it does, yeah.

Can I give you the Sally Rooney view? Now, I'm going to preface this by saying Sally Rooney is very positive about the stylistic achievements of these books. And has also done a lot of, with the form, changing the form around conversations and novels. Quite so, quite so. This is one of the things that Sally Rooney writes. The values of these novels are ultimately bourgeois values. Cusk approaches the philosophical questions of the books with what you might call bourgeois vocabulary, religious, literary and psychological, rather than political or ecological.

In outline, Faye is recently divorced, by kudos she has remarried. At the very close of the final book, a friend asks why she married again, knowing what she now knows about the laws of conventional life. I hope to get the better of those laws, Faye replies, by living within them. She might equally be hoping to feel the protections of bourgeois life by living within it, but its morality and its formal codes of conduct seem at times to corrode her perceptiveness. Now, here's the thing, like the true wishy-washy person I am, I agree with both Tessa and Sally. I don't think Sally was being too, she was critiquing.

She wasn't slagging it off. What she's saying is, are these written against the bourgeois grain, or are they the bourgeois grain and coming down on the latter I thought in Una what was very interesting about that was you said something yesterday about Flobert's Madame Bovary you know Madame Bovary which is the

bourgeois novel of the 19th century par excellence and Flobar himself who says live like a bourgeois so you can be wild and original in your work Well, to some extent, what Cusks is doing there is quite knowingly subverting that idea and appropriating it as a woman, as a female novelist rather than a male one. And we return, defying us, therefore, to critique her.

She's seen the trap and she's laid a new trap. It's magnificent. There's all kinds of different ways of being a feminist. maybe these 10 more towards a kind of liberal than a Marxist feminist type of book. I agree with Sally Rooney, I think, you know, the stylistic excellence, but that ultimately they are bourgeois. And that I think is kind of evidence by the form that they take and her statements about there is only my truth that I can verify. There's no real sense of the social or the interplay between social structure and how that conditions the individual. But again, I think that's probably unfair.

There may be just not a particular interest to that narrator, but then you have to ask why. The thing about these books is that you find yourself reassociating about them as you're thinking about them, as you think them. There's a direct line, perhaps, between these and Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Just that, yeah, yeah, yeah, a 13-volume stream-of-consciousness novel about the life of the woman who's writing it, which invents stream of consciousness as she's writing it. So it's formally innovative. Yeah, I hope that's the subject to the next backlist. We're doing the 13th one, aren't we? Yeah, are we? Yeah, great.

What other authors do you think are kind of not influenced necessarily by, but are doing similar things? Because when I read this, I thought of Deborah Levy and... Yes, very much, Deborah Levy. Who has a bit more narrative, but also has that same sort of distance. Her equivalent of the Outline Trilogy, her trilogy, they are non-fiction. And Luna and I were discussing this yesterday.

So you've got a category here of fiction and non-fiction, the line between which is really porous between those two. And yet what do they have in common? I would argue they have age, class, gender, background to get in common, right? Feminism, motherhood. I would also like to just, we don't have to come up with a definitive answer,

but we might consider why, The two female authors of the last 10 years who have enjoyed the most critical attention and commercial success are Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney. They have both made formal innovations to the novel, as we understand it, and yet one is significantly more venerated. than the other. And we might ask ourselves why that is, you know. What is it about the backgrounds of those two writers, their age group? Who reads them? That's a really important part of this.

In other words... Sorry, I must have sold more, though, right? She probably sold more, but let's be clear. I've seen her books on the telly as well. But in both cases, in both cases, both novels published Conversations with Friends is 2017. Outline is 2014. They're both published by Faber. Yeah.

You know, they're both surprise bestsellers. I think that is fair to say. And yet the kudos, if you will, goes to cusk rather than. than Rooney. And we might ask ourselves why that is. So I think it's youth of the writer in Sally Rooney's case. I think possibly her Irishness may play into this, so something a little askew, that perhaps her subject matter was initially perceived to be overlapping with not chicklets, but the sort of mainstream young female

reader's novel, yeah. So I think probably there are sort of questions of whether those books overlap with genre in some way. But I would say that Sally Rune now has a kind of global reputation, perhaps as an intellectual

that I think is probably surpassing Cusk. I would like to observe merely that both authors found enthusiastic readerships amongst the types of reader who can see themselves reflected in those books. So Sally Rooney's novels are read by younger people and I would argue that one of the, one of the benefits of the specificity of the type of person Rachel Cusk writes about in the outline trilogy is they just happen to be probably the biggest fiction reading market out there. So in other words, people like Rachel Cusk, her class, background, etc., see themselves reflected in those novels, just as people of Rooney's background, political persuasion, etc.,

see themselves reflected in hers. I would also add that there was those people, those women, let's call it what we are, women my age, our age, you know, perhaps didn't feel there were books like that about them in this way before, right? So there's a sense of like, this is about the mundane, it's about my position as a mother, as I said, a working mother. And that I think is a, you know, let's not undervalue that subject, you know, about just kind of, This is, the mundanity of life is also really powerful and is also really kind of persuasive.

I did a little straw poll amongst some friends and said, you know. I was just about to ask you about this. I did a kind of like, what do you think about Rachel Cusk, you know, amongst friends I know who are readers? And a number of them, all kind of women of my age, most of them parents, thank you. A number of them had read a life's work. And one of them said it spoke to me just as I'd had a baby. it was incredible, it was honest, it was raw, it was fantastic. A number of other people said, I was handed this book when I just had a baby

and it was, I couldn't, it was too much. It was, you know, I really didn't like it. So I felt really, you couldn't handle the truth. Perhaps, perhaps. And so it was, so it was very much opposing kind of views. And, you know, you were either, they tended to either be passionate advocates or people who just dismissed it outright. There wasn't a kind of, it's all right.

And I said at the beginning about whether I would remember this book in 10 years' time, or whether I may have already read it, is that I think, you know, it's a hard book. I asked a friend who said she was an absolute huge fan of the Outline Trilogy. And I said, oh, which one did you like the most? And, of course, she couldn't remember one thing from another because there's not memorable incidents in the book. There's not a plot to speak of what there really is, and we talked about this before, is a feeling and an approach and all those things that, you know, that you value from it. But it's quite hard to hold on to in 10 years' time to say,

what is it that you enjoyed about this book or to talk about it? To come back to them, and I had forgotten most of the detail of incident. I think before I went back into the reread, the strongest impression I had of the books was, ironically, the narrator. Right. Interesting. yeah yeah okay i i i yeah well we we nominated transit here in this episode but as you can tell listeners we just wandered wildly all right now i don't make sense individually i think they do though don't they because i could read let's say i hadn't read outline in 2014 and taken a guinea

and let's say i picked up transit cold i'm pretty sure i would have enjoyed transit more right Why? I don't know particularly. Maybe it's like I said, maybe because I find the vision slightly less exclusive and slightly more compassionate. What about the ending of transit? The ending of transit and kudos are both really interesting. I loved the ending of kudos. We can't say what it is. But there's almost, it's like the angriest moment in all three books is saved up for the very end. Faye is in it more, isn't she, at the very end? Yeah, yeah. I thought it was wonderful. I thought the ending of transit is so dark. It's not dark as a a horrible macab thing, but it's this, it's this dinner party that's just the worst dinner

party, really, because these poor children are at this, you know, we've all been at those dinner parties, but people don't send their kids to bed. Send the kids to bed, guys. And they don't. Instead, they're clearly getting more drunk and more kind of, you should eat that thing that, you know, you don't like and all the kids are crying. And then one kid gets, um, single parent. She sort of anecdotally reveals the, um, the, who the father is of the daughter. and the 12-olds never heard it before. Yeah. And it's just horrendous.

It's like Buil, that bit. It's horrible, yeah. It's an awful dinner party. No, just to say that in that scene and the end of kudos, suddenly there's a sort of, instead of her sitting back in the same way, she's really, she's drawing a picture in a way that she doesn't, in the rest of the book so much. And I thought they were both fantastic.

I am assuming that none. nothing has been left to chance in these novels and that Rachel Kusk is in total control of her material. I found it terribly interesting and rather funny that the author of A Life's Work, who is notorious for her honest, truthful attitude towards children, on no less than seven occasions she Faye describes other characters as being like quote big babies

I mean that's got to be that seven is a lot that's got to be deliberate that can't be an oversight by a by a lazy editor that is a that's a choice big babies

you know and and the way Faye deals with people however fairly or unfairly we might feel it is defying critique. She does tend to shuffle them into two categories. Are they serious people or are they big babies? Are they grown-ups or are they children? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very interesting.

And that makes the conversations with her son so poignant because, yeah, because she's being asked to straddle that line, I think. always at a distance, aren't they? The conversation of the son is always on the phone or far away. And she makes a judgment on other people's parenting a lot, but also her own parenting because she's very absent in the books. And I think that's kind of, you know, it's telling, isn't it? And the sons are kind of grown up, but then if they can't be big babies on the phone

to their mother, can they be big babies? But then that's the being a big baby on the phone to their mother near the end of the third part. is almost the happy ending of the whole novels. Human connection. Yeah. Yeah, right, okay. Speaking of happy endings, we're going to have to have our own happy ending soon. Well, we've broken new ground in the art of podcasting today, colleagues.

Thank you for your cooperation. And that's where we must leave things. Kudos to Una and Nikki and to you for listening. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 251 episodes, please visit our website at backlisted.fm.

If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Remember, if you subscribe at the lock listener level, you get two extra exclusive podcasts every month

plus installments of Andy's great project, inventory, and the chance to join a community of dedicated listeners and readers like ourselves. But before we go, Nikki, is there anything you'd like to add about Rachel Cusk's work that we didn't get to in the show? The name Faye, only mentioned once in each book. Is it? Only once. Oh, I like that.

There are more big babies than there are Faye. Faye. That's good to know, isn't it? Okay. Una, was there anything you'd like to add about this, this experience of going back? And I will say, you know, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope people enjoy listening to it. I hope so. Totally fascinating. Yeah, I hope.

Will they dare to critique us, Andy? That's what I've got to know. Definitely bourgeois conversation that we've had. Oh, yes, indeed. What did you think? The only thing that I think came up while I was thinking, I've only really started thinking about this is that it's, if you think of the issue with book as I am a camera, this is I am a recorder.

It's the kind of auditory equivalence with, I think, all that that implies. But it's kind of an upmarket Bosch recorder, isn't it, rather than a... Oh, yeah. The bit of tone. A cheap little. Yeah. But, you know, written in a wave of rising fascism, the whole showback. What about you, Andy?

Is anything you like to add? I have to tell this story because the piece is still online now. 20 years ago, Rachel Cusk published a piece. Peace in the Guardian called The Outsider. You can find it online, still online, and it's, it recounts with a cold killer's eye, her experience of joining her local book group. Oh, no, it is, no, it is, first of all, it's very funny, okay, but unfortunately, the again, I talked to her about a twist.

The twist in the story is that this was in the early days of comment is free on the Guardian. Oh, is there loads of chat? And when she published the article, one of the responses was from a woman in the book group who wrote an extensive and no less hilarious account of what it had been like having Rachel Cusk in their book group. She dared to critique. She really did. That woman was a huge. Oh my God. Can you read us the comment? No, because they haven't archived the comments.

No way. History is written by the victors, Nikki. And so Rachel's account, Rachel Cusk's account remains online. But this mere member of the public has been erased from the record. That's not the democratic web we were promised. Let's wrap up and stop recording. Say goodbye, Andy. Goodbye, Andy. No, bye-bye everyone. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.