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Aftermath

On Marriage and Separation

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Aftermath

By: Rachel Cusk
Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
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About this listen

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. In the months that followed, life as she had known it came apart, "like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces".

Aftermath chronicles this perilous journey as the author redefines herself as a single woman and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a 'normal' life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all.

Aftermath is a masterly work in which the author, at her most candid and rigorous, charts the largely unwritten journey back to order from the chaos that is left when a family breaks apart.

©2020 Rachel Cusk (P)2020 Faber & Faber Divorce & Separation Relationships
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Musings set against family life. Gently swinging between form and substance, private faces and public, hidden lives and exposed pains, partings and gatherings. Sounds esoteric but only because I can’t write like Rachel. It works. The book works. Thanks

Sail along

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What an amazing writer she is, and it’s enhanced by the narrator.
Now I’ll go back and listen again!

Amazing

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Another outstanding book from Rachel Cusk. Painful, honest, complicated, enlightening. It’s what I hoped Cusk would bring to the subject of separation. Crucially, we can hear the hidden and embedded aspects of power and control from the perspective of a female writer on the topic of relationship atrophy and with this there is the chance to see the assumed dynamics that marriage imposes upon women particularly.

Aftermath

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