Who Is Rachel Cusk’s New Book Really About?

A few months ago, I traveled to a new city in a foreign country to talk about a book I’d written. At lunch one day, my host told me about a publishing acquaintance of hers who’d hosted the writer Rachel Cusk some years back, only to find herself seemingly replicated later, in cartoonish and (she felt) unflattering form, within one of the books in Cusk’s Outline trilogy. The woman was apparently devastated; although Cusk had withheld some details, the portrait, according to its presumptive…