I suppose I was having what one might call an out of body experience: for the first real time, I was seeing my behaviour in someone else and I was speechless.Ī similar feeling overcame me while reading Rachel Cusk. I saw myself standing next to the book critic, both our heads bent over the phone screen. My eyes dilated, and the laughter and chatter from other guests became muted, as if I was underwater.

Perhaps she could be forgiven for devoting large portions of her time to what were essentially inconsequential messages lobbed backwards and forwards at what was for him irregular, but for her ever increasingly desperate intervals.Īll of a sudden, I was standing on the street, looking through the full-length windows at the party happening inside. It was easy to view her behaviour as mildly irrational, but this of course was unfair: her career was predicated on reading between the lines of texts, and ascribing meaning to seemingly random symbols and motifs. As she thumbed through the messages on her tiny phone screen, the book critic tried to regain some dignity by making a joke about being trained to read the subtext in everything, and we both laughed at the metaphor she was applying like a band-aid to her bruised ego.

What had gone wrong, her eyes seemed to implore.

It was obvious the book critic was upset and had been obsessing about this exchange. All around us people mingled awkwardly, either staring at their phones to look busy, or attempting to strike up an easy camaraderie with colleagues they barely knew, so afraid everyone was of any awkward lull in the conversation. She was a big talker, and at times it was hard to get a word in edgeways. I nodded sympathetically and sipped from my glass. His messages had become shorter and less inviting: a bad sign only people not invested in the exchange would quickly intuit.

But the man had recently gone quiet on her. Like the man, she was intelligent and accomplished and good with words, both on the page and in person. We were standing at an author event, a wine glass in each hand, reading through the message history on her phone.Īt the time the book critic was hung up on a man – another writer, it so happens. I once had a conversation with a book critic, a conversation that’s played on my mind ever since.

Kudos by Rachel Cusk