by Rachel Cusk
Book Review by Luke Meidell
Author Description
Rachel Cusk is the author of three memoirs—A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath—and nine previous 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; The Bradshaw Variations; Outline; Transit; and, most recent, Kudos. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best Young British Novelists. She lives in London.
Summary
Aftermath is Rachel Cusk’s personal memoir on her separation and divorce. It is split into eight chapters that could each be described as a specific personal essay on a theme of her divorce. She analyzes the details of her marriage, comparing its destruction to the fall of the Roman Empire or to a dismantled jigsaw puzzle.
She is blunt in her condemnation of marriage as a tool of men and Christianity, created to subjugate women, to enslave them and keep them from achieving their potential. As the memoir continues, she subtly claims that the end of the marriage is her own fault, possibly caused by her feminist values, and then at other times comparing it to a toothache that required full extraction of the tooth. But she also demonstrates her willingness to be brutally honest about her own deficiencies in the divorce, for example, when talking about child custody:
“You can’t divide people in half,” I said.
“They should be with me half the time,” he said.
“They’re my children,” I said. “They belong to me.”
[…]
The children belong to me; once I would have criticized such a sentiment severely, but of certain parts of life there can be no foreknowledge.”
She then goes on to describe her slowly diminishing size, a description of her aunt and uncle’s unhappy relationship, and her interactions with family, friends, her therapist, a new boyfriend, and the altered relationship she has with her ex.
Ruminations
One thing that resonated with me was her description of her ex and his reaction to the divorce:
My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn’t be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories.
Those stories include the feelings and emotions and pain that she shares that are universal in divorce, including a feeling of naked bereavement and destitution. Rachel Cusk lays bare the rawness that not only exists for the dumpee but also the dumper and is honest (as honest as a memoir can be) about her role in the divorce. Because of this honesty, I felt a stronger connection to Rachel Cusk’s ex than I did to the author herself. Part of this is because of the stories she chose to share regarding some of the decisions she made about her young daughters post-divorce, decisions that likely contributed to more negativity in her daughters’ lives.
Yet even though I felt a stronger connection to the unnamed ex in the writer’s memoir, I was able to relate to some of her main points, such as the inability to sleep, the ever-present grief cycle, going on family vacations as a new divorcee, and the difficulty of dating again post-divorce. It is these descriptions of divorce that are universal.
Entertainment Value
As a memoir goes, her writing is excellent, switching between an almost stream of consciousness to descriptive prose that elevates sleeplessness in her seaside town to “consciousness filled up with the lumber of dreams, of broken-edged sections of the past heaving and stirring in the undertow.” As such, I give it 4 stars for writing quality and entertainment value.
Helpfulness in Divorce
As a book that is helpful in your divorce, it is not a cathartic read for people who never wanted a divorce, which is the majority who are seeking peace after broken relationships. It does a good job of describing post-divorce emotions, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a helpful read for someone trying to find hope and healing from their divorce. As such, I give it 2 and a half stars for helpfulness in divorce.
If you want to try it out, you can purchase it on Amazon at the following link: