While I Have Not Yet Read Rachel Cusk, She Intrigues Me

 So, I took some time to read her interview of Ira Sachs, I’m Only Interested in the Real: A Conversation Between Rachel Cusk and Ira Sachs. Only it was Sachs who made go "Oh, yeah."

I think what hurts is often the encounter with capitalism and all its tangents, in the sense that you’re making something that’s deeply personal, and then it arrives and it becomes a commodity, and that’s by nature painful. Specifically, it’s like encountering two bodies—you have the critical body and you have the industry body, and both of them can hurt you and also make your future less certain as an artist. That’s what you encounter as you release something into the audience and into the world.

I have such reverence for the novel, and I appreciate you seeing in the work an aesthetic that is maybe grounded in the novel, because I would say my education as an artist began with the novel. The novel has been more important to me than any other art form—particularly when I was really young. But I’m always interested in how I fail to achieve certain things that a novel can do and that writers do.

The difference is between film and the novel, but can failures be more instructive than successes? 

sch 5/5