Essays for Women, about Women,

about why they write at all, often at the expense of their womanhood. The aim is to lift all humans into a greater sense of the creative potential of life, especially housed in womanhood. Not that this is what motivated Cusk, I don't think she'd put it that way, and we could be more erudite in our analytical response to her modern voice expert in tradition (the male world), but I leave that to the many competent literary critics while I express how her essays restored my soul.

I cannot help but take a higher metaphysical approach to Cusk's work, it seems, whenever I read/hear her write everything I wished I had written. After each essay I found myself wondering if anything more could ever be written on the subject. There is something so undeniably definitive about her observations and analysis. Her writing shows us what essays are for and how they celebrate and encourage self knowledge in others.

She unveils the more inextricable roots of and more tenacious obstacles to true womanhood around every human corner of emotional battle and intellectual struggle (often in the face of an invented oppositional manhood since the beginning of all delusion) with uncanny quotidian example or poignantly wasted (childhood) potential. In the first essays she is hard on herself, and the ones in the second part on (fellow) authors are piercing yet always forgiving. They understand and identify that essential drive to write for better or worse, uncovering again deeper motivations (soul essence I gave to call it), never falling into plain critique nor praise but demonstrates we are all only human and how bizar it is that we play along at being human, sometimes, thankfully, reinventing ourselves thanks to intuition (which simply is female and hence so hard to access in a male dominated world.)

For me, Coventry made a seamless read onto Second Place; where as the little cooking pears of the themes in her essays are reddened by our sympathetic understanding and elated appreciation, later we find Cusk shows us where to pluck plump golden pears of inner resolve, to savour straight from the tree. Coventry made for me a collection of meditations, as an exploratory work of the eternally feminine suppressed until it triumphs simply. (Always and only in the individual. Forget joining a group. Usually when at an age past the obligation put upon us to accept roles the existence of men ascribe to us: which could work for any and all genders.)

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Brilliant insights

Adored this book of essays, so enlightening and brilliantly done. Narrator was also brilliant! Cusk is astute, striking in her prose and insights.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!