It is one of those summer days when England is pretending to be another country, and flinty Stiffkey, on the north Norfolk coast, is festive in the heat, the sea shining, the marshes expansive, the sky endless. This is where I find the writer Rachel Cusk. She spends half the year here, the other half in London's Tufnell Park. We arrive at the same moment at her front door and as she gets out of the car, she is all grace, though possibly a touch flustered at having narrowly avoided arriving after me. She is dressed in jeans and a navy shirt. She is pretty, elegant and taller than I had imagined. I realise it is the most hazardous thing to have expectations – and I'm talking about depth not height here – to be tempted into thinking one knows her from her writing.
For there is a sense in which Cusk is a mystery; it is one of the reasons I want to meet her. She has written seven novels (the first, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread first novel prize in 1993; others have been similarly feted) and three memoirs in which she spares herself nothing. She writes about strong feelings and excites them. Her book about motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), written after her first daughter was born and when she was pregnant with the second, got a violently mixed reception (she is the mother mums love to hate on Mumsnet) because it dared to describe new motherhood's limbo in exhausting, exhaustive detail.
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) was a beautiful book – about a three-month family trip – at its lofty best on the subject of art. But it came to grief when one of the people described in it sued – not because of inaccuracy but because he could be identified. The book was pulped.
Most controversially, two years ago, there was Aftermath, about the breakdown of Cusk's marriage to photographer Adrian Clarke. It was this intense, exposed, high-risk book that had people reaching for their knives. She enraged partly because she did not try to censor an animal instinct that the children remain with her, rather than be shared. Nor did she conceal her outrage that, as the main breadwinner (her husband had given up his job as a civil liberties lawyer and was thus able to look after the children more than he otherwise would have done) she would remain financially obliged to him. Even her "dearest friend", she says, tells her "the thing you should never have done was write that book". With Aftermath "there was so much stuff in my own life that the divide [between life and the book] was completely breached, my marital arguments the subject of newspaper articles, criticisms of me in my personal life were being broadcast on Radio 4".
She has never kept a journal, except during the period of her marriage breakdown: "In the end, I had written tens of thousands of words… my computer was breaking down. I took it to a bloke on the Holloway Road and he said, 'Oh well, we'll just have to wipe everything off there'. And then he said, 'Do you want to save anything on it?' and I said, 'No'. And it was sent into the ether and it was a marvellous feeling." She laughs in a way I was not expecting. I'm surprised to find I like her – I suppose I hadn't been sure I would. But then surprise, I'm about to discover, is the norm with Rachel Cusk.
We are meeting today because she is about to publish a new semi-autobiographical novel of originality and poise: Outline. It defies ordinary categorisation. It is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face. The narrator is a writer who goes to teach creative writing in Greece and becomes enmeshed in other peoples' narratives which Cusk stitches, with fastidious brilliance, into a single fabric. It is a reminder that every life is, to some extent, a random weave of stories. How far was the invisible narrator a reaction to Aftermath's critical mugging?
"Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist."
For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was "fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry." Using herself as the "template" was judged by some readers as a "wilful exposure of self, a washing of dirty laundry in public".
Finding form as a writer, she argues, has always been her most important task – it took two years to hit upon Outline's outline. The writing itself is secondary. For a writer of eloquent precision, it is interesting to hear her shrug off the question of style. She sees style as inescapable from self, allied to it: "Just as a person, don't you sometimes get sick of being yourself and want to be the thing you aren't? But you are the thing you are – to me, that is style. It is relatively bonded to self and there is not a lot you can do about it. Form is different." She cannot be found in the new novel, she says, yet she is there. She believes Outline's "annihilated perspective" might be the "beginning of something interesting" (she is already working on a sequel). And now she makes another astonishing assertion: "I'm certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art." Is she right? I'm not sure. Even on literary turf, she is effortlessly provocative.
On the drive to meet her, I have been asking myself: why does she annoy so much? She is not like Lewis Carroll's sneezing pig/baby, she doesn't do it to annoy because she knows it teases. My hunch is she cannot help herself. She is compelled. I have an idea that she cannot make space for readers' reactions, her own thinking takes up too much room. It would be easy to dismiss this as self-involved – and it is – but that is beside the point. She is writing as she lives. Her pursuit of truth is brave and if there is a preciousness involved, she doesn't try to edit herself. She tests the edge of things, wonders why it hurts. She keeps her head above the parapet with predictable consequences. I decide to ask if she knows the answer.
"I have thought about it a great deal. I annoy everybody, not just certain women," she laughs again. "I think it is because I'm not interested in the group, only in the individual. What happens is my message enters the conflicted person reading it who is half self, half society but does not know where one begins and the other ends. I light up that conflict and it makes people angry." Hostility catches her unawares: "However often it happens, I never predict it. My most fundamental feeling is of non-importance." It is only in England she is pilloried. Elsewhere, she is respected – Paris Review is publishing Outline in extracts. And the Poles love her, too.
Post-divorce, in a period of emotional vagrancy, something new happened: "You are chucked out of the house, on the street, not defended any more, not a member of anything, you have no history, no network. What you have is people, strangers in the street, and the only way you can know them is by what they say. I became attuned to these encounters because I had no frame or context any more. I could hear a purity of narrative in the way people described their lives. The intense experience of hearing this became the framework of the novel." And she reaches for another statement – bolder yet: "For me, writing and living are the same thing, or they ought to be. It is only by paying great attention to ordinary living that I actually learn anything about writing."
Restlessness has defined Cusk's life – her writing is restless, too. Her parents, middle-class Catholics, left England as newlyweds to Canada to escape "pinched, dreary postwar Hertfordshire. They wanted an adventure." She was born in 1967, the second of four children. The family then moved to California until she was eight. "It was in Los Angeles that my mother's pining for England set up in me that discourse of here and there. She fantasised about an England where everything is perfect, and when we returned, we moved house countless times. At 11, I went to boarding school: St Mary's Convent in Cambridge." In passing, she raises the idea that being sent to boarding school was an expulsion, and in the background, a bigger question is looming: "I seem to be driven to get expelled and disapproved of and yet I want to belong and be safe and be part of everything – I have been a prisoner of that dynamic all my life."
It was in Bury St Edmunds that her parents eventually settled. "Leaving California was an awakening of perception because everything [here] – seasons, rain, food – was different for a deracinated Californian. There, it was eternal sunshine; that was fine but all I knew. Here, I was very ill – asthmatic and allergic to the wet world of England with dogs and mould… my whole system was hit by this juggernaut of sensory stuff and it had the most amazing effect. East Anglia was the place where that happened."
She has sinced moved several times, from Oxford, where she read English at New College, to London, then back to Oxford, followed by Somerset, Bristol, Brighton, plus three months in Italy, and now dividing her time between Tufnell Park and Stiffkey. Could she explain what drives the restlessness? She thinks it is inherited but also about "believing in what is ahead" – and being in pursuit of mystery. Back in East Anglia again, all these years later, it is not mystery she has acquired but the known – she finds it strange yet steadying to feel something corresponding to a "return" and she introduces me, in passing, to her new partner, Simon, who has a talent for converting unpromising houses. At last, she is in a place, she suggests, where she need not be on the run like the wanted criminal that her imagination sometimes allows herself to feel she is.
And would she say she is relieved to have left behind those years of early motherhood, now her daughters, Albertine and Jessye, are in their teens? "I don't think I ever leave any state behind," she says, "because I have written about it." As a woman, she sees herself as having moved away from feminism to a "more Lawrentian view of gender as having its own inherent beauty. My struggle has been that my femininity was unavailable to me." I can't help noticing how often DH Lawrence shows up in her thinking – as literary sidekick. "I would so love to have had him as my friend," she says.
What I most enjoy about meeting Cusk is her uncompromising intelligence. But for her, the lack of compromise has been a mixed blessing. It is something she is belatedly recognising about herself. She talks about looking obsessively at married couples after her divorce, silently congratulating them on their staying power. And then it came to her – it would be obvious to another sort of woman – that it was not all about luck, that will came into it and compromise: "It was more conscious than I'd realised, this creating of bonds." She started looking at women and thinking: "You knew. You knew. And you have got that suede handbag and that car and that house because you knew you had to live by this system that involves a lot of compromise but it means you are safe and you have bothered to make yourself safe and I never, never, never have. And why haven't I? Am I stupid? Clearly, yes."
Whatever else she may be, stupid, clearly, she is not. And as I drive home through the beautiful county Noël Coward dismissed, I think about how she is at the service of her own cleverness and incapable of a flat word.
This article was amended on 27 August 2014 as it had erroneously suggested that Paris Review is a French publication
