Excerpt from Second Place by Rachel Cusk, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven't managed to liberate my smallest toe. I believe Tony is free, and his freedom doesn't look like much. He gets on his blue tractor to mow the tall grass that has to be cut back for spring and I watch him calmly going up and down in his big floppy hat under the sky, back and forth in the noise of the engine. All around him the cherry trees are welling up, the little nubs on their branches straining to burst into blossom for him, and the skylark shoots into the sky as he passes and hangs there singing and twirling like an acrobat. Meanwhile, I just sit staring straight in front of me with nothing to do. That's all I've managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and the things I don't like. After that, there isn't all that much left! When Tony's been working on the land I rouse myself to cook for him, and go out to pick herbs from the garden and to look in the shed for potatoes. At that time of year – the spring – the potatoes we store in the shed start to sprout, even though we keep them in complete darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it's spring, and sometimes I'll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do.

The morning after that night in Paris, when I got up and walked beside the river, my body barely felt the ground: the green glittering water, and the worn slanted stone walls of palest beige, and the early sun shining on them and on me as I moved through them, made such a buoyant element that I became weightless. I wonder whether that is what it feels like to be loved – by which I mean the important love, the one you receive before you know strictly speaking that you exist. My safety in that moment felt limitless. What was it, I wonder, that I saw to make me feel that way, when in reality I was anything but safe? When in fact I had glimpsed the germ of a possibility that was soon to grow and rage like a cancer through my life, consuming years, consuming substance; when a few hours later I would be sitting face-to-face with the devil himself?

I must have wandered along for quite some time, because when I came back up to the street the shops were open and there were people and cars moving around in the sun. I was hungry, and so I started to pay attention to the shopfronts, looking for somewhere I could buy something to eat. I'm not good in that situation, Jeffers: I find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without. I hold back, embarrassed by need – my own and other people's. This sounds like a ridiculous quality, and I've always known I would be the first to be trampled underfoot in a crisis, though I've noticed that children are also like this and find the needs of their particular body embarrassing. When I say this to Tony, that I would be the first to go under because I wouldn't fight for my share, he laughs and says he doesn't think so. So much for self-knowledge, Jeffers!

Whatever the truth is, there weren't many people about that morning in Paris, and the streets where I was walking, which were somewhere near the Rue du Bac, were entirely devoid of things to eat in the first place. Instead the shops were full of exotic fabrics and antiques and colonial-era curios costing several weeks of an ordinary person's wages, and of a particular fragrance which was the fragrance, I suppose, of money, and I looked in the windows as I passed, as though I were considering making a purchase of a large carved-wood African head at that early hour of the morning. The streets were perfect chasms of light and shade and I made sure to stay in the sun, walking without any other purpose or direction. Presently, ahead of me, I saw a sign that had been set out on the pavement, and on that sign was an image. The image, Jeffers, was of a painting by L, and it was part of an advertisement for an exhibition of his work at a gallery nearby. Even from a distance I recognised something about it, though I still can't say quite what it was, because though I had vaguely heard of L, I had no real idea when or how I had heard of him, nor of who he was or what he painted. Nonetheless he spoke to me: he addressed me there on that Paris street, and I followed the signs one after another until I arrived at the gallery and walked straight in through the open door.

Excerpted from Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Cusk. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.