Parade
Interview conducted by Clare O’Dea, journalist and author
Born in 1967, British writer Rachel Cusk likes to talk about women, their aspirations and their difficulties in living in a society built by and for men. In her autobiographical novels Outline trilogy – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018) – an unnamed narrator chronicling the conversations she has with others, as she goes about her life as a writer. In 2020, her novel Second Place (La dépendance, Gallimard) received the Prix Femina étranger. She comes back with Parade, an exhilarating new novel about art, womanhood and violence, one which confronts and upends the conventions of storytelling. Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. Couples seek escape in distant lands. In Parade, Rachel Cusk pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life, fraught alliances between men and women and the nature of identity, morality and gender.