Susan Johnson

Well, I have to say, I don't think it's hyperbole what the publishers are saying about this book.

I think Cusk is a writer now that you can actually compare to the Brontes.

I mean, you could put her in the same breath.

I think that her work is of the really highest order.

And I think it's interesting that all this kind of criticism that she has attracted is

just would not happen to a male writer.

In my experience, she's being attacked for having too much feeling or not having enough feeling, for being too cool, for being too cruel.

She is a writer of the stature of someone like Kotzee.

You just don't see these things being written about male writers.

So I think you have to take all that into account with the way she has been critically received.

But I totally agree with Mireille that her work has now gone into another sphere entirely.

And I think that it's interesting.

I published a memoir of motherhood around the same time as she did.

And I also attracted that kind of level of vitriol, nowhere near at the same extent, of course.

But, you know, women are, and especially mothers, are only allowed...

to be a certain way.

So personally, I've found all her memoirs, even including Life's Work, which is a wonderful piece of work, vaguely unsatisfying in some way, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

She has got this ability to kind of

remove herself from the text in some way, even though she's supposed to be writing about such an intimate, personal thing as her own divorce.

I found that what this trilogy does is actually put back all that emotion.