“I think it’s really difficult for people to understand the feeling in people my age-liberal people my age-of the actual destruction of their reality that is Brexit, and the government that has been spawned by it,” she said, now seated at her dining table, speaking with the same degree of care and deliberation that distinguishes her writing. “If you’re a person like me, you cannot resign yourself to a life of repetition,” she explained when I inquired how she could abandon what looked, from the gorgeous online images, like a minimalist feng-shui oasis in the marshlands of Stiffkey, England. She was friendly and soft-spoken as we made our way to the kitchen. There was the slightest discrepancy between the informality of her outfit and the entirely adultlike, no-nonsense aspect of her bearing. Cusk-who, at 55, is tall and slender, with straight brown hair that falls to her shoulders-answered the door wearing slim-cut denim and chunky white sneakers. And I have a suspicion that this move to Paris-a city full of the sort of bourgeois social situations she captures with such punishing honesty-will yield something spectacular.Įquipped with jambon-fromage sandwiches and berry tarts, I hopped on an electric scooter to visit her one Sunday this past summer. Cusk’s is a literature of immaculately crafted observations, as aesthetically exhilarating as it is philosophically devastating. In essay after essay, novel after novel, Cusk has demonstrated what the author Heidi Julavits aptly termed-in her review of Outline, the first in Cusk’s trilogy of innovative autofictional novels-“lethally intelligent” prose. It is not every day that a writer you believe to be one of the greatest living novelists up and expatriates to a few minutes from your doorstep. From that level, there remains a final, minimal set of steps leading up to a loftlike living space, which gives way to a lovely terrace with unobstructed views that more than justify the effort needed to get there.

Once inside her place, you are confronted with yet another staircase, at the top of which runs a sleek corridor of rooms and a highly Instagrammable reading nook.

T o access Rachel Cusk’s apartment in Paris, on the top floor of a narrow residential building in the Marais, you must first climb five flights of winding stairs.

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