In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life’s Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce’s tremendous impact on the lives of women.

An unflinching chronicle of Cusk’s own recent separation and the upheaval that followed—“a jigsaw dismantled”—it is also a vivid study of divorce’s complex place in our society. “Aftermath” originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.

About Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk is the author of two memoirs, A Life’s Work and The Last Supper (FSG, 2009), and seven novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park (FSG, 2007); and The Bradshaw Variations (FSG, 2010). She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives inBrighton, England.

Editorial Review

Cusk (The Bradshaw Variations, 2010, etc.) fixes an unnervingly steady gaze on the breakdown of her domestic life. “There was nothing left to dismantle,” she writes, “except the children, and that would require the intervention of science.” In her third memoir, the author brings together elements of a well-constructed novel—it’s compelling and even thrilling, even though the story is unsurprising and banal (man meets woman, and they create a family; family falls apart; man, woman and children grieve)—and its novelistic feel is a credit to Cusk’s literary risk-taking. She doesn’t tell her tale straight; instead, she weaves in figures from ancient Greek drama (Oedipus, Antigone, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra) and thickens the bare-bones plot with striking, elaborate turns of phrase and powerful images. The last and most unorthodox chapter is told, by Cusk, from the perspective of her au pair Sonia, a scared, scarred girl whom the author abruptly fired when her husband left (though she did provide her with another job). What is most startling about the Sonia chapter is not that the self-sufficient, Oxford-educated Cusk so convincingly inhabits the mind of an unskilled young foreigner, but that she is willing to expose herself at her worst: cold, harsh, pitiless and even cruel to a woman far more vulnerable than she. – Kirkus Reviews

Unhappy All the Time - ‘Aftermath,’ by Rachel Cusk

The New York Times Book Review – August 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1999, the British novelist Rachel Cusk gave birth to a daughter and then, 15 months later, to a second one. Like women writers all over the planet, she realized motherhood was material. So she wrote a book, “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother,” which came out in Britain in 2001, when her younger daughter was a year old.

The book was heavily promoted in England as “brutally honest,” which meant many women really hated it. “On and on it went, back and forth,” Cusk wrote later in a Guardian article about the book’s reception. “I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual.”

But literary reviewers also found much to love in her pages. “Compulsive as a thriller,” one wrote. “A powerful, often funny account of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering that doesn’t gloss over the pain, mystery and confusion — but does celebrate the wonder,” another said. The book sold well.

So it stands to reason that on getting divorced from her daughters’ father, Cusk should write another memoir. “After­math: On Marriage and Separation” is the bookend to “A Life’s Work.” Good for her. If motherhood can be material, why not this? [Read the full article...]

“Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation” By Rachel Cusk

The Washington Post Book Review – September 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

Early in her memoir “Aftermath,” Rachel Cusk describes a milestone in the life of anyone who has ever divorced: the first holiday apart.

She and her two daughters “go to a Christmas carol service and I watch the other families. I watch mother and father and children. And I see it so clearly, as though I were looking in at them through a brightly lit window from the darkness outside; see the story in which they play their roles, their parts, with the whole world as a backdrop. We’re not part of that story any more, my children and I. We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.”

Cusk is a great observer of the roles people — and especially women — play, studying not only the garbs they put on for tradition and ideology, but also how this action affects their understanding of themselves. The author of seven novels, she is best known for her 2001 memoir, “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother,” in which she chronicled the difficulty she had maintaining her identity amid the trappings of motherhood. In that work, the problem was one of addition. [Read the full article...]

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DOODLEBUGS & SPITFIRES
Memories and Short Stories by Peter Carroll

“Doodlebugs & Spitfires” is a delightful collection of memories and short stories written by Peter Carroll, the author of “Queen of Misfortune,” in his trademark poetic and profoundly thoughtful style.

Most of his stories, previously published in limited form in local English newspapers and magazines, like “Brave New World”, “The Forties Street Tradesmen”, “Doodlebugs”, or “The Christmas of 43” evolve around his childhood in the Northern part of London during and after World War II. He describes the horrors that came with the V1 flying bombs, nicknamed the “Doodlebugs.” Heroic British pilots in their “Spitfire” airplanes would attempt to divert the flying bombs from the populated areas, sometimes successful, and sometimes not.

Doodlebugs & Spitfires is available at Amazon.Com and its Kindle store, Amazon.co.uk and its Kindle store, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.