![]() ![]() The most compelling contribution is the titular essay, in which the word ‘Coventry’ refers to the English idiom of ‘being sent to Coventry’, meaning to be ignored and isolated. In Coventry, a new collection of memoir, literary criticism, and essays, which includes ‘Aftermath’, Cusk explores the way story – who controls it and its relationship to the truth – shapes our reality. If the invisible narrator of the subsequent Outline novels was an attempt to move away from story and subjectivity, Cusk remains no less obsessed with these ideas. It wasn’t the first time Cusk’s work had raised eyebrows: her memoir, A Life’s Work: On becoming a mother (2001), offended many a book-club member with its frank and unflattering descriptions of motherhood. ![]() The dramatic excoriation of marital life aroused apoplexy among critics and readers they bristled at Cusk’s subjective and one-sided storytelling, as if any other account of divorce were possible. Two years before Rachel Cusk published the first novel in her acclaimed Outline Trilogy (2014–18), she wrote a searing account of her divorce, entitled ‘Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation’, which ignited a brouhaha in her homeland, the United Kingdom. ![]()
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