Rachel Cusk

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity.

I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all.

It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of his wife, like the reality of the house, was structural, determinative. It had limitations, which he encounters when he hears his wife on the telephone. Yet the life without limitations has been exhausting, has been one long history of actual and emotional expense, like thirty years of living in one hotel after another. It is the feeling of impermanence, of homelessness, that has cost him. He has spent and spent to rid himself of that feeling, to put a roof over his own head. And all the time he sees at a distance his home – his wife – standing there, essentially unchanged, but belonging to other people now.

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

It made you a better writer, did it not, not having an identity to fall back on: you saw the world with less troubled eyes.

It’s as if he can’t quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. I suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground. Though the temptation can be extreme

like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.