I had a Rachel Cusk summer. Before Life of M arrived, I began my journey with Cusk’s work by starting the Outline trilogy in June. Soon after, I read Parade and Second Place. Two months after its release, I’ve mostly forgotten about Life of M, but I can’t stop thinking about Second Place: a story narrated by M, a middle-aged writer living on an isolated, swampy coastal marsh with her second husband, Tony. M invites L, a famous, self-centered painter whom she has admired for years, to stay in a guesthouse on their property, and his arrival throws her life into chaos.
Second Place continues her abandonment of the novel’s traditional form (autofiction, absence of character names and time and place, spoken as a monologue) and leans into melodrama — it literally begins with M (not the M from Life of M!) running into THE DEVIL on the train leaving Paris. The story then descends into an obsessive spiral reminiscent of (light spoiler:) Christina Yang’s third season wedding in Grey’s Anatomy. It’s acerbic, nasty, soapy, and has become a major inspiration for my in-progress novel.
Cusk told The Yale Review in 2022: “Okay, you can just say it. You can have the devil in your book. I wanted to introduce the concept of evil in a very melodramatic way that would make it a presence in the book but didn’t have to be too philosophically thought out. It could be a feeling of great vulnerability on the part of the person who’s speaking, something that could replace a moral or a religious sense of vulnerability. That kind of drama or melodrama was very much how I wanted the book to be.”
Next Wednesday, October 21, I’ll be hosting a Substack Live with my friend Satya Bhabha, who first told me to read Outline this summer, to discuss Second Place and Cusk’s work writ large.
Satya is a film and television director, writer, and actor whose directing credits include Shameless, Love Life, Queer as Folk, and Gossip Girl. His short film Cover Up, starring Alison Pill and Jason Ritter, screened at TIFF and Telluride before being acquired by Condé Nast. He sold his original pilot The Dick to Amazon, with himself attached to direct, and is attached to direct the features The Company, starring Sheryl Lee Ralph, and The Rebound, starring Lukas Gage.
As an actor, Satya is known for his roles as Matthew Patel in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, and Shivrang in New Girl. His television credits also include Sense8, Key & Peele, The Good Wife, and Netflix’s Critics Choice Award-winning Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Public Assembly, a non-profit community theatre project in Los Angeles that was recently described as an “unlikely cultural phenomenon” by the LA Times. He lives in New York with his husband.
yayyy satya!