This book explores how Rachel Cusk has engaged with autobiography and more generally personal nonfiction in multiple and fascinating ways, putting her work at the crossroads of many important trends in contemporary life writing. It identifies four main categories of self-referential texts: more or less autobiographical novels, autofictional texts (tagged as novels, including the Outline Trilogy), memoirs and essays. Through these four categories, Cusk journeys into contemporary life writing, displaying a vast array of self-narrative possibilities available to authors who decide to write about their own lives. It also examines Cusk's presence in the media, in which she actively tackles the topic of her own life and how to write about it, as well as the reception of her own texts. 

Arnaud Schmitt is a Full Professor in Anglophone Studies at the University of Pau, France. His recent books include The Photographer as Autobiographer (2022) and his edited volume Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images (2024), both of which were published in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series.