Who Needs Intimacy?

Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?

I am thinking here of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, whose narrator, divorced and currently apart from her children, travels and observes the world with a sense of self so hollowed out as to render her more a conduit for the musings of her interlocutors than a full-fledged character. I also have in mind Jenny Offill’s alienated wife in Dept. of Speculation, as well as Ottessa Moshfegh’s parodically disaffected protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Katie Kitamura’s last two novels, A Separation and Intimacies, are exemplars of this form. Her female protagonists lack the normal trappings of selfhood: They have no names, ages, or detailed backgrounds. They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places in dreamlike Woolfian internal monologue. They recall Emerson’s turn of phrase “I become a transparent eyeball.” Who are they? They’re rarely sure.

“I don’t really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Kitamura said in a recent interview about her new novel, Audition. “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.” Audition, which Kitamura describes as the final entry in a loose trilogy, lingers over this curiosity about the instability of the “self,” and her bafflement at how authenticity could have anything to do with something so clearly assembled and performed.

The narrators of A Separation and Intimacies are translators, one who specializes in contemporary fiction and the other who works as a simultaneous interpreter. Her latest is yet another woman whose job is to become a vessel for other people’s words: She is a stage actor. This is a kind of stakes-raising for Kitamura. Translators are intended to be, at least in theory, impersonal transmitters of language, but an actor is someone for whom the performance of emotional authenticity is paramount, someone who is supposed to make the words convincingly their own. The actor’s career is itself a string of alter-selves.

Kitamura’s narrator is again nameless, and we learn almost nothing of her childhood, family of origin, or race, though we’re given clues that she is not white and that she is middle-aged. Her vocation requires the skill of transformation and self-abnegation, as well as a receptiveness to language and emotion not her own. Accordingly, she feels attuned to the ways in which selfhood can be permeable and subject to manipulation by persuasive narrative. The actor finds that an all-consuming story is a thrill, but “also a danger for a person of my disposition, for whom the managing of these borders was not always easy.”

This instability is a signature of Kitamura’s women. They tend to be encased in rigid professional or class structures that they observe and enter through language—a medium that Kitamura portrays as forceful but morally ambiguous. The narrator of Intimacies, who serves as an interpreter in trials of war crimes—her job, she reflects, is “to repeat the unspeakable”—comes to think that she’s neutralizing the crimes, or causing them “to recede further and further into some state of unreality.”

Audition’s plot revolves around a rupture in the border between reality and unreality for the narrator: A young man, Xavier, shows up when she’s rehearsing a new play, introduces himself, and confesses that he’s been looking for her. An article he’d read about her described her “giving up a child” many years ago, and he thinks he was that child. The actor stares at him. “He was evidently in the grip of some serious delusion,” she thinks, “or else he was a grifter of some kind, it was one or the other.”

As he talks, she acknowledges to herself that his story, if misguided, is also “a little bit comprehensible.” Back when she was single, she’d had an abortion, which had been obfuscated in the article. And she’d had another brush with maternity: Much later, after marrying her husband, Tomas, she became pregnant again. Tomas had grown emotionally attached to their future as parents and was quietly devastated when she miscarried. She was comparatively cool about the end of the pregnancy, a difference in responses that silently drove a wedge between them.

The encounter with Xavier highlights these facts of her life—she never gave birth, never became a mother—while also stirring a sense of doubt. She had noticed the way that Xavier sits back in his chair and gives a little sigh. “I realized with a growing sense of horror that I myself had made that exact gesture, had utilized it, to be more precise, many times in my work.” It is the kind of twinning of small gestures that occurs between parents and children, those epigenetic tics that subconsciously signal that two people are family. Not that she has concrete reason to question her own life history, but the assuredness with which she has just declared Xavier to be delusional or manipulative begins to waver.

[From the July/August 2024 Issue: Rachel Cusk’s lonely experiment]

This tiny reflex draws attention to how little we know of this actor’s body (except that it has seemingly never carried a child to term)—a distancing of corporeal experience shared across the recent fictional array of silvery, cerebral female consciousnesses. Writing in The Atlantic about Cusk’s 2024 novel, Parade, the critic Nicholas Dames described this variety of fiction as a slow process of almost ascetic, transcendent self-erasure: “No more identities, no more social roles, even no more imperatives of the body—a clearing of the ground that has, as Cusk insists, particular urgency for writing by women, who have always had to confront the limits to their autonomy in their quests to think and create.” Kitamura’s actor has been constrained by both her gender and her race. As a woman of color, she has been forced repeatedly to play “only parts that were commensurate with erasure,” characters who “were quite literally silent, a moving image, and nothing else.”

The trend of alienated and disembodied female narrators can be read as a collective rejection of the social “imperatives” of the body, allowing, as the novelist Heidi Julavits suggested in her review of Cusk’s Outline, “a more complex portrait of a person—a self instead of a set of gender stereotypes.” This is a Pyrrhic victory, one that seems to preclude the possibility that a woman could create and think in concert with her body.

What’s more, these narrators commonly achieve their spectral detachment only in the ambivalent or ruinous aftermath of procreation. Offill’s narrator in Dept. of Speculation decided in her youth to skip marriage and motherhood in favor of being “an art monster,” and the novel tracks her struggle, after reversing her earlier decision, to reconcile herself to the life of a mother-wife-writer. In Outline, the narrator reveals that she has recently moved from the countryside to London, bidding farewell to “our family home,” after having “stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.” Kitamura’s actor, too, has achieved a kind of creative and professional zenith only after renouncing the prospect of such a home, and Xavier’s claim suddenly confronts her with the alternative reality of being a very different kind of character: a mother.

His declaration/question is destabilizing precisely because it is in some way seductive. Kitamura has talked about her abiding interest in the “psychological and ethical repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel for language,” and one can detect in her work a broader query: What are the repercussions of allowing yourself to be a vessel at all—whether for language, for art, for a child, for a beloved’s needs and desires?

This becomes the through line of Audition, which plays again and again with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people and the flawed interpretations they invite. For the actor, what transpires is not an escape from the motherhood plot, but a vertiginous, possibly delusional slide into it. Unsure of who she and Xavier are to each other, she also begins to lose her grip on what Tomas actually knows and feels about her, and she about him.

As the novel progresses, this sense of unreality sharpens. On arriving at her apartment,

I felt as if I were entering a space long uninhabited, for a brief moment it was as if I had come into an apartment that looked exactly like my home in every last particular, down to the vase on the table in the hall and the coats hanging from the rack, and yet was not my home at all.

When she later runs into Xavier on her way to rehearsal, he seems to have completely forgotten about his claim on her and behaves warmly but professionally, explaining that the play’s director has taken him on as an assistant. “I found myself wondering if I had misunderstood or misinterpreted or even misremembered the entire unlikely thing,” she confesses. A pattern emerges: She is sure of her interactions, and sure of herself, until she is not.

Audition is broken into two parts. At the end of the first, the actor and Tomas are approaching a moment of confrontation. Part two opens with a feeling of déjà vu: The actor and Xavier are sitting across from each other in a restaurant, as they were earlier in the book. Months have passed, rehearsals are over, and the show has become a smash hit. Now Tomas is at the table and Xavier is her son—is their son. He’s asking to come live at home with her and Tomas. Tomas is making a toast. “As he lifted his glass I gazed at Tomas and then at Xavier, their faces soft and smiling in the light, united in the same expression, each an echo of the other.” When she hugs Xavier later, she remembers “what it was like to embrace him as a child, the animal scent of the skin at his neck.”

This disjuncture—a total reassembly of the terms of the story—goes unremarked upon and unexplained. The actor carries on in the same stream-of-consciousness style as before, acknowledging no memory of the terms of part one. Are we in a parallel universe? Are we in the same universe, and the narrator has somehow become psychologically destabilized? Is this a game?

As interactions among the actor, Tomas, and Xavier spiral into an ever more baroque and unsettling drama, another option suggests itself: Perhaps the three of them have embarked upon a shared performance, constructing a family where there was none, and doing it so faithfully that they never, not even in their own thoughts, break character. In a moment of strain, the actor realizes that all along, they

had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held.

But the glamour between the actor and Xavier has dissipated, “as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”

This is the revelatory moment that these novels of female alienation inevitably confront: the dissolving of any illusion that intimacy is possible, the failure of the narratives that unify a family, the crumbling of the relational identities (mother, wife) that have pinned her in place. Instead of floating uneasily through the world of the book, the narrator rises skyward, like a balloon, totally untethered.

The formal moves by which Kitamura delivers the actor to this place are unusual and interesting, yet the trajectory toward giddy estrangement is familiar—such a staple of all these plots that it arguably now defines a subgenre of the contemporary literary novel. Why has this become a “type” of fiction, and this narrator a kind of woman with whom the literary world is preoccupied?

The untethered narrator enacts, to a degree, a welcome fantasy: that the alienation generated inside long marriages and complex parent-child relationships—or intrinsic to living in a fraying social and political world—can both provide inspiration for profound art and also be left behind entirely. In the same way, this arc imagines that the body’s burdens, demands, and constraints can be readily abandoned for an escape into pure consciousness. “I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance,” the actor reflects:

that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire … We don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

But one can’t—women especially can’t—elude embodiment and entanglement in the end. Not in this country, not anywhere—not even in novels, however attenuated their characters become. We are ensnared in the real, as much as we might wish it were otherwise. The book’s end finds the actor reassembling her marriage, hoping to make peace with Xavier, and attempting to create art from inside the confusing mess of a self that she could not escape. No matter how lost in her mind or subsumed in a fiction she becomes, she must return, over and over, to her own life, home, and marriage. The tethers don’t actually vanish simply because she feels untethered.

[From the January/February 2017 issue: Rachel Cusk remakes her fiction in Transit]

She is once again up on a stage, speaking into a theater’s waiting dark, following “a chain of words, sturdy as a cable, a voice that has been given to me.” She is playing a character patterned after her, “a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.” But this space of performance—of generating something and someone new out of the material of herself—is where she feels the most real: “Here, it is possible to be two things at once,” she recognizes. “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.” I won’t give away who has written the monologue. And Kitamura pulls back, too, declining to forecast a next chapter of the actor’s marriage or what new creation she might forge with her layered selves. But the question that could carry us beyond this spate of novels about the untethered woman beckons: What will this woman make once she’s back in her body and back on the ground?

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “Who Needs Intimacy?”