'To Leave or to Remain': Trauma, Loss and the Reinvention of the Self in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy

This thesis will examine trauma and loss in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy: Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), and how it opposes and supplements another narrative, that of conversion and the reinvention of the self. I will track the tension between the model of personal trauma and loss of the main character and the conversion or rebirth narrative that unfolds in the novels. The trilogy introduces us to Faye, a writer who has recently divorced her husband after seven years of marriage and who is living alone with their two sons. This shock of modern life is something Faye, over the course of three novels, tries to cope with – she searches for a new way of living in the world. But, moving on from her lived trauma turns out to be more difficult than expected and we witness a constant pull between wanting to reinvent the self and being incapable of doing so as the trauma from the past keeps on coming back. By listening to the stories from people she meets while travelling: on planes, at cafés, during dinners and while she teaches writing courses, we discover that her own story is always submerged in the stories of her interlocutors. A collection of shocks of modern life quite similar to her own unfolds in front of us as we read