The Elimination of Self as an Aesthetic Project in Rachel Cusk’s <i>Outline</i> and Olivia Laing’s <i>Crudo</i>

This paper examines the consequences of eliminating the ‘story of self’ from the writing of a life in two recent novels, Rachel Cusk’s (Citation2014. Outline. London: Vintage) and Olivia Laing’s (2018. Crudo. London: Picador). In their different ways, each text retreats from the novelistic conventions of character and plot, disrupting the normalising functions of narrative agency. Liberated from these codes, Outline and Crudo expose an uncertain reality, a situation which I read as a confrontation with nihilism, both as an existential crisis and as a distinctive contemporary phenomenon. The paper argues that the aesthetic project of self-elimination in these novels shows how autofictional writing might respond to the nihilism of our current reality through a re-evaluation of the values embedded in the ‘story of the self’.