Rachel Cusk: my broken marriage
When Rachel Cusk's happy relationship of 10 years turned into a bitter break-up, she wondered how she and her two daughters would copeRecently my husband and I separated, and over the course of a few weeks the life we'd made broke apart, like a jigsaw ...
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Joan Didion's memoir of the death of her daughter is troublingJoan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking was a book that seemed to lend a certain credibility to a form – the memoir – that is sometimes regarded with suspicion, as a kind of sabb...
All That I Am by Anna Funder
Anna Funder's story of dissidents in Nazi-era Germany deals with themes of freedom and betrayalAnna Funder's first book, Stasiland, was a work of great originality and interest. An account of life in the former German Democratic Republic, it sought to ...
Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality by Rebecca Asher
Adapting to the injustices of motherhood can be brutal for modern, culturally equal women. But in dashing the myth of equality Rebecca Asher misses a bigger truth about womanhoodBecoming a mother reveals a woman's capacity for numerous things: virtue,...
The woman question
As The Rainbow and Women in Love are adapted for TV, Rachel Cusk reflects on how these daring novels subverted Victorian gender stereotypes and how Lawrence has been badly served by his libidinous imageThe Rainbow came into the world more or less witho...
The Female Eunuch, 40 years on
Funny, angry, clever and hopeful – The Female Eunuch set out to transform women's lives. Does Germaine Greer's seminal tract still speak to feminists? Yes, writes Rachel CuskPerhaps politics is always to one extent or another autobiography, but in fe...
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Millions of women have fallen for Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of self-discovery. Why, asks Rachel Cusk, as Eat, Pray, Love opens as a Julia Roberts blockbusterThere's a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir of breakdown and recovery, c...
