Outline

by Rachel Cusk

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too. Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain.

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.

writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside.

Appearances, my neighbour replied, were highly valued in his own family, but he had learned – perhaps fatally – to view them as a mechanism of deception and disguise. And it was in the closest relationships that the deception had to be greatest, for obvious reasons.

family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.