I once met a girl who introduced herself to me as “brutally self-aware,” which has become a trendy quality for people to flaunt. This friend was particularly prone to self-portrayals of startling inaccuracy. I’d leave our conversations hopelessly confused until I realized that whatever she told me, I’d just have to assume the opposite: “I’m painfully shy” (she was in fact quite gregarious), “I’m an empath” (she was kind but not debilitatingly so). At first, I thought this mind trick of mine was unique to her, but I soon worried I could apply it to almost anyone, including myself. “Believe people when they tell you who they are,” Maya Angelou wrote, but I wonder if it’s really the reverse that’s true.
Rachel Cusk has always been dubious about the relationship between telling and being. Parade, her seventeenth and most recent book, opens on an artist named G, who, “because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down.” His “discovery of inversion” is so stunning that he is showered with plaudits, and even his wife, when she starts to feel overwhelmed, “simply inverts her surroundings and instantly feels a sensation of peace.” By painting the world right side up, your brain fills in blanks and makes assumptions; upside down, ambiguous shapes and shadows reveal themselves in their true form. Cusk, it seems, is familiar with the opposite game too—self-knowledge requires some critical distance.
