Transit by Rachel Cusk

Fiction, 2016

Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when start to think that you kill things just by being there. Yet when she looked at her mother, who lived alone in such squalor that frankly they’d be better off burning the house to the ground when the time came to sell it, she saw someone happy in her solitude, in her work. It’s like there’s something she doesn’t know, she said, because no one’s ever forced her to know it.

In Transit, the second novel in the trilogy that started with Outline, Rachel Cusk takes her narrative minimalism to a whole other level. Where the earlier book at least played footsie with a traditional plot, Transit is so committed to impression over incident that it’s almost dreamlike, though in some alternative existence where dreams are build upon realism. The writing is so evocative the certainty of emotion on the page is itself moving, even when the exchanges between characters aren’t particularly deep or awash in feeling. I’d struggle to respond to the commonplace question “What’s the book about?,” but I can’t shake the sensation of reading it, of dipping into lives so completely that it’s almost dizzying. It’s empathy made into an almost solid construct.

This Woman’s Work edited by Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon

Nonfiction, 2022

As soon as I arrived at his place, Mark told me that he’d made me a mix. It told a story, he said. We lay on his bed and listened: first came the jaunty stuff that represented our salad days, Blink-182’s iconic “Josie”, “Yeah, my girlfriend takes me home when I’m too drunk to drive’, and the inevitable 311: ‘I know a drugstore cowgirl so afraid of getting bored’ … Then it veered hard into emo songs meant to express the ways we understood each other’s darker parts, the secret conversations between our scars.

Irish scribe Sinéad Gleeson teams with Kim Gordon, the heroically cool bassist and vocalist for Sonic Youth, to edit this collection of essays about music, all from female writers. One of the major strengths of this set is that chromosome distribution is the only real unifying factor. Some pieces are explicitly feminist and others are indistinguishable from admiring analysis that might be written by anyone. The latter is, of course, the fundamental point. Writing about music, especially rock music, has been largely seen as a pastime for boys for too long. This Woman’s Work is a fine corrective. I’m especially fond of the essays by Anne Enright, Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and, quoted above, Leslie Jamison.