Mireille Juchau

Marriage and divorce, loss and sorrow, the kind of forces that can deform or shape women's lives.

So her preoccupation is with what happens to women in the aftermath of crisis often.

She has a very kind of witty take on things.

So in Kudos, we get a lot of material about the sort of ludicrous scenarios that occur at writers' festivals.

And I found some of them quite interesting.

funny.

And I think the humour does translate beyond just the kind of narrow literary world.

There are scenes at which she's set up for a variety of interviews about her work.

And even during those scenes, I think several of the interviewers fail to ask her a single question.

And so the focus is entirely on what they have to say.

And by doing that, by sort of being a largely invisible narrator, we're sort of

a lot of Faye's personal life is withheld from us.

And I think that's quite a deliberate strategy in the wake of what we discussed about Cusk's earlier work.

Yes.

I found it very satisfying, but it is quite different to the other two.

I adored Outline because I think I, because it is the first of the three and I was coming to something entirely new.

I had that thrill of discovery and the joy of kind of seeing what she'd done, how she'd developed from her previous work.

And so that never left me, even though I've spoken to other writers who prefer the second one.

I actually, I think just because of that thrill of finding the first one and that's become, that became my favourite.

But interestingly, with the three, they're quite different in the sense that, I mean, this question of the dreamlike quality of kudos, I don't know that that exists so much anymore.