Rachel Cusk

was an essay about Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, the book that has inspired me more than anything else in my life, and none of them had a single word to say about it.

‘At this point,’ she said, ‘I stopped reading: for the first time, I felt that Lawrence was going to fail to transport me out of my own life. Perhaps it was the snow, or the strangeness of the woman, or the peacock itself, but suddenly I felt that these events, and the world he described, had nothing to do with me, here in my modern flat in the heat of Athens. For some reason I couldn’t bear it any longer, the feeling that I was the helpless passenger of his vision, so I closed the book,’ she said, ‘and I went to bed.’

She found herself wondering what it would be like to have sex with him, whether being so different they would disgust one another.