Stories figure prominently in this collection of essays, all originally published or forthcoming elsewhere, by Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy. They're addressed, of course, in the collection's seven pieces about literature, from classics like The Age of Innocence to best-sellers like Never Let Me Go. But stories are also at the crux of essays about driving, relationships, homemaking, and parenting. It was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, Cusk writes in Driving as Metaphor. It is almost as if she feels that the true story of her family has eluded her, she speculates about a friend in the collection's titular essay. She writes of the home as her mother's novel, and of the public narrative of parenthood. Stories, Cusk insists, are not just the stuff of literature. They are our way of being in the world. We suspend our disbelief. We repeat. We elide. We exaggerate. To make sense of reality's chaos, we create narratives that, though they may bend the truth, produce order. Opening up the deep crevices of everyday life's paradoxes, myths, and more, Cusk pulls apart the stories we tell to reflect on the mess underneath.--Maggie Taft Copyright 2019 Booklist

Memoirist and novelist Cusk (Kudos) turns her perceptive gaze and distinctive voice to a variety of topics in her arresting first essay collection. Broken into three sections, the volume takes its title from an English term for "the silent treatment," which typified how Cusk's parents disciplined her as a child. The opening chapters focus on memoir, but within the context of broader questions about society, families, women and work, and what makes a home. Cusk tackles, in addition to her fraught relationship with her parents, life after separating from her husband and with her daughters as they become teenagers (in the deliciously titled "Lions on Leashes"). In the second section, she examines art and its creation, in one piece grappling with "women's writing" in terms of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir ("Shakespeare's Sisters"). The final section ventures into literary criticism with analyses of writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, D.H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning, and Edith Wharton. There is an element of stream of consciousness to Cusk's prose, with its effortless transitions from one idea to another. However, the overriding thread binding her essays is the uses of narrative, particularly for allowing people to make sense of their lives. It's something Cusk interrogates exceptionally well throughout this well-crafted compilation. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.