Aftermath by Rachel Cusk

I read Cusk’s excellent memoir about motherhood and selfhood a year or two ago, and swiftly afterwards bought her other memoir, though for various reasons didn’t come to read it until now.

This one, rather than focusing on the complex (if universally agreed to be broadly positive) experience of becoming a parent, looks at something that is similarly complex yet mostly deemed to be – and experienced to be – negative: that of a break-up, a divorce, a separation.

What Cusk does here that sets this beautiful, serious, moving and frequently very funny text apart from your run-of-the-mill break-up text is to focus not on the break-up itself, but on its aftermath. Hence the title.

This isn’t about screaming and shouting and falling out of love, this isn’t about a warm and rewarding rebound romance or the joys to be found in the freedoms of single life and co-parenting when the person you’re co-parenting with regularly takes the children to a different address, and it isn’t about rediscovering intellectual or social joys that a relationship caused you to lose, and it isn’t about working on the self and becoming a better and wholer (as in “more whole”, you know what I mean) person, and though, yes, all of this exists here in a peripheral position (slash in occasional flashbacks), this still doesn’t feel like what the book is about.

Aftermath, like all good memoirs, is not about a universalising experience made personal or a personal experience made universal, but it is instead about a personal experience made, explored, described and expanded in such a way that it remains personal and powerful and potent throughout.

–///–

Confession: I haven’t read Cusk’s wildly acclaimed Outline trilogy, which is something I should have done, yes, I know, I know it’s something I should have done, so maybe I’m more impressed by my tiny little paddle into the oeuvre of Cusk than I would be had I been a person familiar with those texts. Which, to reiterate, I’m not.

But I thought this was fucking excellent. I thought it was great.

–///–

Cusk considers the minutiae of separation, the realisations and understandings of rejection, of change, of shifts… She reflects on the ways her unhappily married friends avoid her for fear of separation being contagious (her friends in stable marriages she instead avoids (for fear of being reminded of lost potential futures for a bit at least)), while her unhappily and lonely single friends seek her out as someone to be miserable with…

There is, too, lots of retelling of Grecian myth, exploring feelings and situations Cusk is experiencing by locating them within a human history of thought, a human history of feeling… Cusk quickly but succinctly, articulately, tells the story of Antigone, of Iphigenia, of Oedipus, of Agamemnon, of others… She also tells the stories of her peers and their varying responses to similar situations and how and why marriages have ended (or why they should have when they haven’t), and she takes a lodger who is also recently broken up with who, rather than focusing on “holding things together” (as Cusk very Englishly does) instead takes to binge drinking, ready meals and weeping at volume in the garden at night …

The final chapter has a sudden shift of perspective and tone and is instead a narrative about a young woman who has just failed to graduate from high school who travels from her hometown in Eastern Europe to work as a live-in nanny/au pair/domestic servant for an English couple. This young woman is highly traumatised following a sexual assault and is floundering not only due to the traumatic event and the drastic move to another country, but also due to being over-medicated by a disinterested doctor. This, it is slowly revealed, was Cusk’s live-in domestic servant prior to the divorce (sleeping in a room later available for a lodger), and it is through this third person perspective, then, that we finally see the disintegration of Cusk’s marriage… Although as a short story this is definitely an effective and powerful piece of writing, but as a finale to this otherwise direct, honest, open and unaffected piece of writing, it does muddy the waters a bit, though one would have to assume that coming from a writer with Cusk’s critical reputation that this is intentional rather than a failing..? I for one felt a bit like I’d been tricked into feeling empathy for a person and a family so detached from the day-to-day realities and miseries of normal life that they’re able to – and choose to – pay for a live-in domestic servant, but maybe this isn’t the intended reaction? But I think maybe it was, the live-in domestic servant as a sign of the broken humanity that had grown in that unhappy house… The traumatic personal history of your servant is an inconvenience to you, rather than a tragedy to them… when we are reduced to thoughts like this, I suppose, it is because we are unhappy, trapped, stuck, floundering…

Is the Cusk at the end of the book a happier person? Yes. Does she still think live-in domestic servants are normal? Yes, but she does recognise that they are humans with complex emotional inner lives, which is (of course!) an improvement!

Nonetheless (and my class politics aside), a really excellent book. Complicated, serious, human, but also funny, sad and short. Many ticks from me!