When Rachel Cusk's happy relationship of 10 years turned into a bitter break-up, she wondered how she and her two daughters would cope

Recently my husband and I separated, and over the course of a few weeks the life we'd made broke apart, like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces. "The new reality" was a phrase that kept coming up: people used it to describe my situation, as though it might represent a kind of progress. But it was in fact a regression. A plate falls to the floor: the new reality is that it is broken. I had to get used to the new reality. My two young daughters had to get used to the new reality. But the new reality, as far as I could see, was only something broken. It had been created and for years it had served its purpose, but in pieces it was good for nothing.

My husband believed I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn't be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth. For me, life's difficulty has generally lain in the attempt to reconcile these two, like the child of divorce tries to reconcile its parents. My own children do that, forcing my husband's hand into mine when we're all together. They're trying to make the story true again, or to make the truth untrue.

In the mornings I take my daughters to school. We spend the evenings mostly alone; I feed them and put them to bed. Every few days they go to their father's and then the house is empty. At first these interludes were difficult to bear. Now they have a kind of neutrality about them. It is as though these solitary hours, in which for the first time in many years nothing is expected or required of me, are my spoils of war, are what I have received in exchange for all this conflict. I swallow them down like hospital food.

Call yourself a feminist, my husband would say to me, disgustedly, in the raw bitter weeks after we separated. He believed he had taken the part of woman in our marriage, and seemed to expect me to defend him against myself, the male oppressor. My husband said he wanted half of everything, including the children. No, I said. What do you mean no, he said. You can't divide people in half, I said. They should be with me half the time, he said. They're my children, I said. They belong to me.

Once I would have criticised such a sentiment severely, but of certain parts of life there can be no foreknowledge. Where had this heresy gestated? If it was part of me, where had it lived for all those years, in our egalitarian household? Where had it hidden itself? My mother liked to talk about the early English Catholics forced to live and worship in secrecy, sleeping in cupboards or underneath the floorboards. To her it seemed extraordinary that the true beliefs should have to hide themselves. Was this, in fact, a persecuted truth, and our own way of life the heresy?

It has existed in a kind of banishment, my flesh history with my daughters. Have I been, as a mother, denied? The long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth, the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed – all unmentioned, wilfully or casually forgotten as time has passed. And I was part of that pact of silence: it was a condition of the treaty that gave me my equality, that I would not invoke the primitivism of the mother, her innate superiority, that voodoo in the face of which the mechanism of equal rights breaks down.

Call yourself a feminist, my husband says. And perhaps one of these days I'll say to him, yes, you're right. I shouldn't call myself a feminist. I'm so terribly sorry. And in a way, I'll mean it. She wouldn't be found haunting the scene of the crime, as it were; loitering in the kitchen, in the maternity ward, at the school gate. She knows that her womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; she knows that women are not born but made. So she stays away from it, like the alcoholic stays away from the bottle. So I suppose a feminist wouldn't get married. She wouldn't have a joint bank account or a house in joint names. She might not have children either, girl children whose surname is not their mother's but their father's, so that when she travels abroad with them they have to swear to the man at passport control that she is their mother.

My father advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother did the same. What I lived as feminism were in fact the cross-dressing values of my father. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.

I remember, when my own children were born feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: I didn't know where my knowledge of it had come from.

To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character, which had evolved on a diet of male values. I was aware, in those early days, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. It reflected nothing about me: its literature and practices, its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine.

So for a while I didn't belong anywhere. I seemed, as a woman, to be extraneous. And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children.

Ten years later, sitting in a solicitor's office, my maternalism did indeed seem primitive to me, almost barbaric. The children belong to me – this was not the kind of rudimentary phrase-making I generally went in for. Yet it was the only thought in my head, there, with the solicitor sitting opposite. I was thin and gaunt with distress, yet in her presence I felt enormous, rough-hewn, a maternal rock encrusted with ancient ugly emotion. She told me I had no rights of any kind. The law in these cases didn't operate on the basis of rights. What mattered was the precedent, and the precedent could be as unprecedented as you liked.

She told me I was obliged to support my husband financially, possibly for ever. But he's a qualified lawyer, I said. And I'm just a writer. What I meant was, he's a man. And I'm just a woman. The old voodoo still banging its drum. The solicitor raised her eyebrows, gave me a bitter little smile. Well, then he knew exactly what he was doing, she said.

For a while I cleaned incessantly, a maternal Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains everywhere. The messy cupboards and cluttered shelves were like an actual subconscious I could purge of its guilt and pain. In those cupboards our family still existed, man and woman still mingled, children were still interleaved with their parents, intimacy survived. One day I took everything out and threw it away.

Summer came, clanging days of glaring sunshine. I could no longer sleep; my consciousness filled up with the lumber of dreams, of broken-edged sections of the past heaving in the undertow. At the school gate, the other women looked somehow quaint. I saw them as though from the emptiness of the ocean, people inhabiting land. They had not destroyed their homes. Why had I destroyed my home?

My children have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs is the pain and the gift of awareness. "I have two homes," my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, "and I have no home." To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

You know the law, my husband said over the phone. He was referring to my obligation to give him money.

I know what's right, I said.

Call yourself a feminist, he said.

What I need is a wife, jokes the stressed-out feminist career woman. The joke is that the feminist's pursuit of male values has led her to the threshold of female exploitation. This is irony. Get it? The feminist scorns that silly complicit creature the housewife. Her first feminist act may have been to try to liberate her own housewife mother, and discover that rescue was neither wanted nor required. I hated my mother's unwaged status, her servitude, her domesticity. Yet I stood accused of recreating exactly those conditions in my own adult life. I had hated my husband's unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother's; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot. Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence. But there was more to it than that, for it might be said that dependence is an agreement between two people. My father depended on my mother, too: he couldn't cook a meal, or look after children from the office. They were two halves that made up a whole.

My notion of half was more like the earthworm's: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked. And my husband helped. It was his phrase. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn't want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me. Why couldn't we be the same? Why couldn't he be compartmentalised, too? And why, exactly, was it helpful for a man to look after his own children, or cook the food that he himself would eat? Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude. And did I not have something of the same gratuitous tone where my wage-earning was concerned? Did I not think there was something awfully helpful about me, a woman, supporting my own family?

And so I felt, beneath the reconfigured surface of things, the tension of the old orthodoxies. We were a man and a woman who in our struggle for equality had simply changed clothes. We were a transvestite couple – well, why not? Except that I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband – meaning well – only did one.

So I was both man and woman, but over time the woman sickened, for her gratifications were fewer. I had to keep out of the kitchen, keep a certain distance from my children, not only to define my husband's femininity but to appease my own male values. The oldest trick in the sexist book is the female need for control of children. I perceived in the sentimentality and narcissism of motherhood a threat to the objectivity that as a writer I valued so highly. But it wasn't control of the children I was necessarily sickening for. It was something subtler – prestige, the prestige that is the mother's reward for the work of bearing her offspring. And that prestige was my husband's. I had given it to him or he had taken it – either way, it was what he got out of our arrangement. And the domestic work I did was in a sense at the service of that prestige, for it encompassed the menial, the trivial, the frankly boring, as though I was busily working behind the scenes to ensure the smooth running of the spectacle on stage.

Sometimes, in the bath, the children cry. Their nakedness, or the warm water, or the comfort of the old routine dislodges their sticking-plaster emotions and shows the wound beneath. I gave them that wound, so now I must take all the blame. I wounded them and in this way I learned truly to love them. Or rather, I admitted it, admitted how much love there was. What is a loving mother? It is someone whose self-interest has been displaced into her children. Her children's suffering causes her more pain than her own.

Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her. It seems to be the fatal and final evolution of the compartmentalised woman, a kind of personality disorder.

In the mornings the sun streams through the windows into the half-empty rooms, like sun falling on a ruin. The water mutters in the pipes; the boiler grumbling cholerically in the basement. One day it finally falls silent; the dishwasher breaks, the drains clog, the knobs of doors and cupboards come away unexpectedly in the hand. There is the sound of dripping water, and a dark stain spreads across the kitchen wall.

A man comes to look at the spare room. His name is Rupert. The clocks have gone forward and now the evenings are long and as blank as paper. People stay out late calling and shouting, music pouring from open windows, cars honking in the dusk. I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in. I wonder whether we will be safer with Rupert in the house or more at risk. There is a space here, a male declivity in the shape of my husband. Vaguely I try to fit Rupert into it. I imagine him fixing the drains, the door handles.

Rupert brings his iron and his humorous posters, his suits. My husband comes to collect something while Rupert is in the hall and the two of them shake hands. "Pleased to meet you," they both say.

Most marriages have a public face, an aspect of performance. A couple arguing in public is like the body bleeding, but there are other forms of death that aren't apparent on the outside. People are shocked by cancer, so noiseless and invisible, and by the break-up of couples whose hostility to one another never showed. You were the last people, a close friend said to me, the last people we expected this to happen to. And this friend, like some others, went away for fear it might be catching.

The first time I saw my husband after our separation I realised, to my surprise, he hated me. I had never seen him hate anyone: it was as though he was contaminated by it, like a coastline painted black by an oil spill. For months black poisonous hatred has flowed, soaked into everything, coated the children like the downy heads of coastal birds are coated in tar. I remember how towards the end it felt like a dam giving way by degrees, the loss of courtesy and caution, the breakdown of civility and self-control: these defences seemed to define the formal core of marriage, of relationship, to articulate the separation of one person from another.

Most evenings now Rupert and I meet in the kitchen. He is always in: I go downstairs and there he is. One evening he opens a bottle of wine and offers me a glass. Upstairs the children lie asleep in their beds: I imagine them there, like people sleeping in the cabin of a ship that has sailed off its course, unconscious of the danger they're in. Rupert sloshes more wine into our glasses. He tells me I'm doing a great job. He tells me we're in the same boat, in a way. After a while I say goodnight, and go and shut myself in my room.

I book our summer holiday, the same holiday we always take, to a much-loved familiar place. I tell my husband we can split the holiday in half, changing over like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of the children. He refuses. He says he will never go to that place again. He thinks there is something ruthless and strange in my intention to revisit a place where once we were together. Great if it doesn't bother you, he says. I say, you want to deny our shared history. You want to pretend our family never happened. That's about right, he says. I say, I don't see why the children should lose everything that made them happy. Great, he says. Good for you.

Rupert is gone in the mornings by the time I get the children up for school, and in the evenings I avoid him. I stay in my room. My daughters and I do not leave home very often. For a while I thought that going elsewhere created possibilities of consolation, even of recovery, but I have discovered that every welcome is also a form of exposure. It is as though, in other people's houses, we become aware of our own nakedness. At one time I mistook this nakedness for freedom, but I don't any more.

It is my mother's 70th birthday party. The youngest person sitting down to lunch is two, the oldest – my grandmother – 92. There has never been a divorce in this clan. Other than myself, of the many assembled adults only my grandmother is without her mate. My grandfather died when my grandmother was in her 60s: for nearly 30 years she has lived without a husband. When I was younger I thought she must be relieved to be alone, after all those years. Though I had loved my grandfather I saw it as a liberation. It never occurred to me either that she might have remained alone out of loyalty to the familial enterprise; that she might have been lonely, but continued to play her part for the sake of her children; that she might have understood, as I did not, that the jigsaw is a mirage, not a prison. It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant.

My sister comes to stay and we take our children to the swings. Later, at the train station, she says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. They are only reflections of you.

I don't believe that, I say.

If they think you're happy, they'll be happy, my sister says.

Their feelings are their own, I say.

What I feel is that I have jumped from a high place, thinking I could fly, and after a few whirling instants have realised I am simply falling. What I feel is the hurtling approach of disaster. And I have believed they were falling with me, my daughters; I have believed I was looking into their hearts, into their souls, and seen terror and despair there. Is it possible that my children are not windows but mirrors? That what I have seen is my own fall, my own terror, not theirs?

I can't eat, and soon my clothes are too big for me. As a family we would eat around the kitchen table, but now I carry my daughters their supper on a tray. The table is covered in papers and books and electricity bills. I remember our family meals as a kind of tree, nourishment. I ask my children what their father feeds them. Takeaways, they say. The tree is dead for him, too, then. He was once an extravagant cook, a person who made pastry and boeuf bourguignon.

A friend comes to visit. I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. I don't go near the photograph album any more, don't look at the art books I once loved, don't listen to the music or read the poetry that have been my life's companions; don't walk on the hills I walked with my husband, don't contemplate foreign trips or visits to interesting places. And I don't eat, for fear that nourishment will hurt me with its inferences of pleasure.

At a party in London I meet Z. A room that is too warm and full of people. I had to walk around the park across the road for an hour before I could bring myself to go in. I don't want to talk; I have nothing to say. I feel like a soldier come back from a war, full of experiences that have silenced me.

X calls. Our conversation is like chewing on barbed wire, like eating ground glass. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.

Every week I drive for 45 minutes along the coast to see Y. I sit in the armchair. Y sits in a beige leather swivel chair. I say, I don't ever want you to tell me that I think too much. If you say that I'll leave.

It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre.

Z comes to see me. We take a walk in the countryside. He is quiet, nervous, taller than I remembered. He seems different every time I look at him. I don't know him. He is mysterious.

As we walk we talk. In our conversation I keep missing my footing. I'm used to talking to someone else. Z walks quickly; I have to run to keep up. He says, narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. I want to live, I say. I don't want to tell my story. I want to live. Z says, the old story has to end before a new one can begin.

That night I call X. I don't know why I call him. I just want to talk, like a climber trapped in a snowstorm on a mountaintop calling home. It is rescue she hopes for. Perhaps she just wants to say goodbye. The roaming itch that drove her away from home, away from ordinary satisfactions, remains mysterious even as it devours her in that cold and lonely place. She calls what she left, calls home.

X answers. Our conversation is like chewing on razor blades, like eating caustic soda. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.

I say to Y, marriage is civilisation and now the barbarians are cavorting in the ruins. Yet we find ruins exquisite, Y says. He seems to suspect me of nostalgia. People overthrow their governments and then they want them back, I say. They evict their dictator and then they don't know what to do with themselves.

Y raises his eyebrows at the word "dictator".

I tell him about the walk with Z. If I was looking for a new dictator, Z didn't get the job. I tell him of the way I showed him around my house, bought flowers, made him a beautiful lunch, like a small country advertising itself for invasion. Is it male attention I want, or male authority?

Is there a difference? Y says.

Z attended to my vision but he wouldn't take possession of it. He backed away and was silent.

X talks. X is a talker. He is like a well signposted museum: it's easy to find your way around, to see what he chooses to display. There are new things there now, new people, new opinions, new tastes in evidence; the old ones have been taken down to the archive, I suppose. But he doesn't like me to visit, doesn't want to talk to me any more. I keep inquiring after what is no longer part of the collection. X furrows his brow, as though he has difficulty recollecting it, this past to which I insist on referring. As soon as he can, he shows me out. The big institutional door, so reassuringly heavy, closes in my face.

Z comes to the house with a bag of tools. He fixes the broken shower, the pipe that leaks water into the kitchen wall. Are all these pieces of paper bills, he says. I don't know, I say. I don't want to open them. I want to live. Z opens one and reads it. He raises his eyebrows, gives a small smile. It's a speeding fine, he says.

I go with Z to the cinema and when we come out I say something about the film he doesn't understand. I feel, suddenly, that I've lost my power of communication. The loss feels as tangible as if I'd boarded an aeroplane and flown to a country whose people didn't speak my language, nor I theirs.

Z lives alone. In my own house I charge from room to room, like a dynamo. I'm trying to keep the house alive. Sometimes it feels that the real house has gone but the children don't know, don't realise that I'm behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz, frantically turning knobs and adjusting microphones to keep the illusion going. In Z's flat I don't move. I become aware of myself, too close, like a stranger sitting down right next to me in a train carriage full of empty seats.

Z waits for the cloud of the cinema trip to pass over. He cooks, runs a bath, gives me a book to read. He says, sometimes for you the saying is a kind of working out, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can't always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean. It's late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can't in any case discern. It's just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite, I can't tell.

In the neutrality of Y's consulting room the whole bloodstained past has been unravelled, but of Z very little is said. I find that I am protective of the silence around Z. The old war can be turned into words, but a living silence ought not to be disturbed. Things might be growing there, like seeds under newly ploughed earth.

Rachel Cusk's new memoir describes with brutal honesty the breakdown of her marriage. Why has she laid bare her family trauma, has she invaded her children's privacy and does she regret it?

Few figures in contemporary British literature divide people like Rachel Cusk. The writer, whose new memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation is published next month, attracts both admiration and ire: for her boldness as an artist, her self-belief, her pitiless gaze at herself and others. Her earlier book, A Life's Work, a devastating confessional about her experience of motherhood, "the long pilgrimage of pregnancy with its wonders and abasements, the apotheosis of childbirth, the sacking and slow rebuilding of every last corner of my private world that motherhood has entailed", attracted fury from some women critics: why bother having children, they said, if you're just going to write about how grim it all is. And Aftermath looks set to provoke more anger: it is a fierce, at times brutal examination of how Cusk left her husband of 10 years, and how she then tried to rebuild her life and the lives of her two children – considering stay-at-home mothers who describe themselves as "lucky", a disturbed lodger and a new lover along the way. She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a manner that is in no way comforting. Women writers do not tend to do this and get away with it.

Her writing is economical and precise – she describes someone as "a woman whose sorrows take extrovert and hedonistic forms" – which won't surprise readers of her under-rated novels. And her eye for detail, which she casts over incidents, interactions, relationships, is both merciless and subtle: from her suggestion that women in conventional families "can't see anything at all", to her admission that in wounding her children "I learned to truly love them", to her pitch-perfect evocation of the post-separation home: "Our daughters and I do not leave home very often: a kind of numbness has settled on our household that any moment can transform into pain." She writes, "they're my children. They belong to me": the sort of primal statement which one rarely reads these days, when men and women are so often seen as equal and identical "parents" rather than mothers and fathers.

Cusk makes you think differently and look differently, even if you don't agree with what she's saying. Here, she answers questions about Aftermath.

Why did you decide to write about your relationship breakdown?

I was asked by Granta magazine in 2010 to contribute an essay about feminism, which they said they wanted to be quite personal; and having thought at first that that wasn't the proper way to discuss feminism, I realised very quickly that for me now, perhaps it was the only way. The radicalism I had felt as a young woman began to seem to me if not exactly semantic then verbal, theoretical. As I have grown older, it is experience that has become radical. It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge. Sex, marriage, motherhood, work, domesticity: it is through living these things that the politics of being a woman are expressed, and I labour this point because it is important to understand that the individual nature of experience is essentially at odds – or should reserve the right to be – with any public discourse. I no longer presume to know how other women live or think or feel. I can only try to align myself with them, to get into sympathy with them, by saying how it is for me. And it is of course intrinsic to femininity that it is costive or denying to a degree, so the saying can become radical in itself, but only from a point of view of personal honesty. So the decision to write comes from that. And as for the subject, it had fallen within the compass of my experience and what I saw was that in the breakdown of marriage the whole broken mechanism of feminism was revealed. I had expected to find, at the end of the family structure, at least some proof of feminist possibility, however harsh. But either it wasn't there or I couldn't find it, and that seemed to me to be a subject worth writing about. The book grew from that essay, which forms the first chapter of it.

Your honesty, precision and intense gaze are unflinching and can be ruthless and unforgiving. You write: "Unclothed, truth can be vulnerable, ungainly, shocking. Over-dressed it becomes a lie." Is it exhausting? Is it worth it?

It's worth it if others find it helpful or meaningful. Yes, there is an element of exhaustion, of self-sacrifice, in this kind of writing, because without the most stringent honesty it is absolutely meaningless.

Have you ever regretted things you have written?

I've regretted the way they were presented. The line between literary memoir and degrading gossip can seem very fine where newspapers – your own not excepted – are concerned. And prose is such a vulnerable medium: the Guardian's "extract" from Aftermath consisted in fact of lines taken from all over the book and compressed into something I could barely recognise as my own writing. I did feel lacerated by people who read my motherhood book and concluded that I hated my children. Or perhaps the point was that they hadn't read it. But many, many small reparations have been set over the years against those big initial knocks and eventually outweighed them. Recently the NCT bookshop contacted me to say that they wanted to stock A Life's Work and I did feel that was a handshake from the heartland, as it were.

Do you ever hold back with what you write?

Yes, of course. Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back. The memoir is a confessional form, but that doesn't mean it is in itself a confession. It isn't a spewing out of emotion. In memoir you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

Writing about yourself is exposing – were you worried what readers, friends and family would think of you?

There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform.

A Life's Work dealt with your experience of motherhood – was it more difficult to write about a relationship which involved two people, and a family of four people?

Yes, the experience of motherhood was very integrated and perhaps easier to write about, partly because the baby is a reflective template rather than a moving target. A developed family structure is obviously much more complex and also much more a product of society and history. It has more hinterland, and is harder to conscript and encompass in a single view. With this book I had to find patterns and parallels from much further back, from the roots of drama and Christianity and early modes of civilisation, in order to represent my sense that marriage is to an extent an illusion of personal choice. In breaking marriage you break more than your own personal narrative. You break a whole form of life that is profound and extensive in its genesis; you break the interface between self and society, self and history, self and fate as determined by these larger forces.

Have you invaded your children's privacy?

Children have to share their parents' destiny to some extent, like it or not. I happen to be a writer; they are the children of a writer. But I also strive to be quite impersonal in the way I write about figures in my life. "My mother" or "my children" are intended to be every reader's mother, every reader's children or concept of children. And in fact very often I've been criticised for not providing enough identifiable detail about these "actual" characters, for not naming them or physically describing them. That criticism, I've always sensed, has come from the very people who might at the same time accuse me of "using" or invading the privacy of those close to me. So I'm a little suspicious of it, while at the same time recognising an obligation to be clear with my daughters about what it is that I do.

Your "writer's objectivity" is important to you. What happens to it when you document something as subjective as the end of a relationship?

I suppose the proof of that will be in the reading, in whether I've managed to represent my personal experience in a way that illuminates something personal for the reader. That is really the essence of the transaction, and my handling of it was tested absolutely in this book. Yet there is something grimly and utterly objective in the breakdown of marriage, many things in fact. In a sense you are returned to the public realm; your private world is broken open and exposed and you come out – metaphorically speaking – on the streets. I wrote a lot of the book from this broken or "outside" perspective, and much of the metaphoric stream in the narrative concerns itself with this new mode of looking, which I liken to looking through the lit windows of other people's houses from the darkness outside.

Why do you think some women were so furious with A Life's Work?

Well I'm tempted to think, because it was true! Why would anyone bother being cross otherwise?

Will anyone be furious with Aftermath?

In motherhood an image is being defended, an image of rightness and completeness and happiness. Many women struggle to maintain that image, and it angers them to have it questioned. I don't think anyone could claim a positive image for divorce, so I don't expect there'll be the same defensiveness. Motherhood has traumatic elements, but divorce is only darkness, only trauma, so there aren't many controversial things that can be said about it. The question is whether it can be represented, whether my trauma can be made to stand for other people's.

Throughout your divorce your husband would say: "Call yourself a feminist." Do you?

I do, partly because it seems ungrateful and impolite not to, and partly because there's nothing else, really, to call oneself while retaining any connection to an original sense of justice.

What do you mean by what you call "the feminist principle of autobiographical writing"?

I mean that there is, for me, a defensible principle of autobiography where female experience is concerned; defensible in the sense that I personally would defend my decision to write about my own life, against the accusation that it is merely so much self-obsession or is the product of a self-obsessed culture. If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it. And given that this disjuncture is usually deeply personal, and relates to a personalised problem with a generalised image, autobiography becomes the best possible form for this articulation to take.

Do children belong to their mothers? You write: "They're my children. They belong to me."

Children belong to themselves, of course. But what I wanted to describe in the book were a number of primitive and fairly ferocious feelings that seemed to emerge from the rupture of separation and that directly contradicted my own meditated feminist politics. This was the beginning of my seeing the difference between feminism as an ideology and feminism as lived experience.

Is it a curse to be a mother?

Motherhood is a great test. It involves enormous submission, and to submit without being extinguished is what is testing. And it is a business of gifts and revelations as well as losses and bewilderments, of great visibility and significance alongside feelings of utter invisibility. So it has a core of contradiction that strikes me as fundamental to life. Perhaps it's a curse to live so close to this core, and perhaps it's merely an intensification of a more general conflict between duty and consciousness, between society and self.

Is it a curse to be a woman?

If it is then it's an interesting one, and it gets all the good lines. It's perhaps true that the less you live as a woman, the more cursed it is to be one.

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, by Rachel Cusk, is published on 1 March by Faber and Faber.

With Rachel Cusk's new book on the end of her marriage causing controversy, writers Tim Lott and Christa D'Souza discuss what drives their impulse to confess, and the responsibilities that come with it

Rachel Cusk's new book Aftermath, about the end of her marriage, has ignited controversy, just as A Life's Work, her previous book about becoming a mother did. Writer Tim Lott, whose books include The Scent of Dried Roses, a family memoir, and journalist Christa D'Souza, who has written about numerous personal subjects including her body and illness, discuss with Emine Saner what drives the confessional impulse. And what their responsibilities are.

Tim Lott: If writers are going to write about their personal lives, they have two conflicting responsibilities. They have to be scrupulously honest, but they do have to protect the parties involved. That is a delicate area when you are writing about your children, or partner or ex-partner. Don't you feel the most important thing is finding a balance between those two priorities?

Christa D'Souza: I do. The truth is paramount and I can be most truthful about myself. I care less about my partner because he's inured to it. He knows I write about myself. My kids I worry about more, with parents of other kids reading it and making snide comments.

TL: Everybody gets it wrong from time to time. I sometimes feel my impulse to reveal has been more harmful than it should have been, but it's what you do as a writer. When I started writing this sort of stuff, once you wrote it, it was kind of lost. Now it's there on the internet and my kids can dredge up a piece I wrote 15 years ago. It's inhibitory because you know that your kid is five now, but when they're 17 they can Google my article and read it. Are there things you wish you hadn't written?

CD: I think so, but – I hope I'm not kidding myself – I think every time I [write about myself] I'm providing a service. I'm providing a service to myself obviously, because it's therapeutic. Most people are supposed to write it down and then crumple it into a ball and throw it away; we don't, it just happens that it's printed. I write about others, but it's more tangential, it's all in relation to me.

TL: If you write about your breast cancer, it's out there for your children to read.

CD: They actually found out about that on the internet. We minimised it to "it's just like a horrible verruca-type thing but it's fine", but they read the story. It wasn't great. And yet I remember very soon after I was diagnosed knowing there was absolutely no way I wasn't going to write about this. It's what I do.

TL: I don't find it therapeutic. I wrote a piece about the murder of my agent, Rod Hall. I was grief-stricken, then I wrote about it in Granta, and people were upset with what I'd written. I had spent so long trying to get it right, but I got some very angry reactions from his friends.

CD: You also wrote about your depression and your mother's suicide, and you didn't feel some kind of catharsis?

TL: I don't know. I still suffer depression so it didn't "cure" it. What you write is a snapshot of what sense you're making of the world at a particular time; it's not "I wrote a book about my mother's suicide and therefore I've put that away".

CD: I think it's helpful for other people who may be going through whatever it is – breast cancer, surgery, depression. It's so wonderful reading other people's stories. Some people want to share every aspect of their lives. Sometimes when I read other people's tweets, that's the same thing isn't it?

TL: I find that the most insulting thing you can say to me [laughs]. I spend months, possibly years, trying to get a sentence right, and you're comparing that with tweeting. Many people are grateful to read a memoir, but there can be a cost. You can hurt people by being honest. For my new book, I took a road trip across America with my brother and I was digging away at him, relentless about trying to get a rise out of him. How much of that was my neuroses, and how much my wish to produce something interesting for the book, I don't know. When I read it back, I thought: "You're such a little prick." I was enormously relieved when I decided to make it a fiction book because it gets you off the hook. Although Hanif Kureishi wrote Intimacy, which was clearly about him and his wife, and he was hauled over the coals. What I hate in any confessional writing is spite and cruelty. I see it in people talking about their marriage breakups. I wrote about mine and how I felt when it was going on, but that's not quite the same as using it to settle scores.

CD: I don't think Rachel Cusk's book is particularly confessional. But what is interesting is the vitriol of the response. I'm sure she's terribly nice in real life, but she has the ability to irritate by her writing. But you think: "Well you don't have to read it." A lot of people relate to it, both positively and negatively.

ES: How do you feel when people react negatively to your pieces?

CD: Of course I mind, I want everyone to love me but it's not going to stop me doing it. I do believe I provide a service.

ES: Is there a difference in the response to male and female writers? Women seem to get criticised far more harshly.

TL: Julie [Myerson] wrote about her son, which is a different area altogether. Liz Jones [the Mail on Sunday columnist who wrote about her disintegrating marriage and is often attacked online and in print] writes very cruel stuff in my view. Then there is The Liars' Club by Mary Karr, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – there are beautiful pieces of confessional writing by women who don't get attacked. I don't think there is a gender issue in that sense. Hanif [Kureishi] got it. I've never seen such a vitriolic response to a book. I got slaughtered by the Guardian when I wrote about my divorce.

CD: Motherhood is seen as sacred ground. I remember how much flak Helen Kirwan-Taylor got for admitting to being bored by her kids [in a piece for the Daily Mail in 2006]. The affront of it! But thing is, they can be quite boring.

TL: You have to try to get approval from the people you're writing about. It's wrong to stomp on people because you have the power to do it. I've got it wrong before. It's hard when you have put yourself out there, and you've possibly risked things with friends or relationship. I've suffered a lot of unhappiness as a result of the stuff I've written, but I go on writing it because that's what I do, and I'm proud of it as pieces of writing, but it can be a high stakes game.

Under the Same Stars by Tim Lott is published on 29 March by Simon & Schuster, price £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

Rachel Cusk published a memoir of the failure of her marriage, to a wave of controversy last week. Yvonne Roberts and Lucy Cavendish – who has often written about her family life – debate whether the rise of the 'confessional' narrative debases or enhances journalism

Yvonne Roberts: Narcissism rules; enlightenment suffers

Who hasn't been entertained, horrified ("how could he/she?"), and sometimes moved by autobiographies and articles that turn the writer inside out?

Most journalists have written two or three features in their careers that are personal: often to campaign, to try to make a difference to the failing status quo. The personal story isn't the star of the show, it is the human connection to a system that needs change, for example, the treatment of dementia or cancer or mental illness.

Yet, even when the terms of engagement are so limited, a one-off, they reveal that while "the personal may be political", attach a Tannoy, and all manner of furies are unleashed and rights abrogated, not least of the children, ex-husbands, siblings and friends, the jackdaw journalist's, often involuntary, supporting cast. These people have no say over the telling of what is their story too. Their privacy is invaded, their most painful moments are exposed to the world.

Personal experience, first heavily employed by male writers, is now a major part of the depoliticised end of women's writing and occurs on an unremitting basis as the "me" in "media" colonises ever larger continents of journalism. Narcissism rules; enlightenment suffers.

Lucy Cavendish: So many issues remain hidden

I have to take issue with the "narcissism rules" comment. Of course, writing about the personal is difficult. But, for me, there are so many issues that remain hidden and I don't think they should be. When I was incredibly low, about a decade ago, I read a piece by a woman suffering from depression and it was instrumental in helping me turn my life around. Do I think she shouldn't have written the piece? Of course not.

There are many issues I would like to write about – alcoholism for one. I haven't gone into that because of the pain it might cause to those around me but, actually, I would be happy to write about it if I felt it would save one hurt, bewildered daughter. What do we do when we need information? We go and read. This personal "narcissistic" writing is part of that information. If I had a son who was getting heavily addicted to drugs, I might turn to the Julie Myerson book that featured her son's descent into drug abuse. Rachel Cusk's Aftermath might help me, guide me, support me during times of marriage breakdown. I thank them for writing these books.

Yvonne Roberts: We are drowning in a sea of memoir

I am baffled by your comment "so many issues remain hidden". On the contrary, we are drowning in a sea of articles, books, memoirs and id-lit, backed by self-help manuals and support groups, offering a potential lifebelt to every woman, man and household pet.

Personal testimony is powerful but it also has the propensity to atrophy genuine experience and turn it into hollow melodrama. While there is a constant danger that the "student" of another's person's trauma may find themselves uncomfortably close to becoming a voyeur, distant and disengaged from empathy, motivated not to change but only by an appetite for the next revelation.

All journalism is about storytelling. It is women war correspondents such as Maggie O'Kane and the late Marie Colvin have done much to turn the gruesome mechanics of battle into grim reality precisely because of the testimonies they have brought home. However, when it comes to the domestic front, "my personal story" too often cements men into the stereotype of Groundhog Day incompetents and women into serial victims of crisis at the hands of themselves and others and the alleged ill-discipline of their own bodies (too fat, too thin, too brittle, just "too"…) Is another person's recovery truly a guide to one's own?

Lucy Cavendish: Universal truths can be conveyed by Dickens or Liz Jones

I think a problem shared is a problem halved but – these relatively light-hearted sentiments aside – there is a long and perfectly admirable tradition of confessional writing. Many classic works of literature have been based on the confessional nature of the novelist – childhood, parents, school days – and their ability to weave a tale from their own experience.

The confessional lies within every genre, be it poetry to novels to travel writing. The travel writer takes the experience of those around him. Do they ask the conductor on the Patagonia Express whether or not they wish to be portrayed in a particular light in a travel book? Of course they don't but we, the reader, don't seem to mind this as we see a dinstiction between certain types of writing. I don't really hold with this distinction. Why do people look down on self-help books when they can possibly help people? Most of us no longer go to the confessional. This is not where secrets are shared and solved.

Writing, to me, is about exploring universal truths and I am not sure whether it matters if it these truths, or versions of them, are conveyed by Dickens or Liz Jones. It's just that some people are better at expressing it than others. So-called confessional writers give a voice of shared experience to those who find it hard to have a voice.

Yvonne Roberts: Mea culpa is journalism's dry rot

You are right, Lucy, the best confessional writing has a universal truth. You refer to Dickens. But often that "truth" relates not just to the state of the self but to the state of society too. Today's epidemic means the political connection to the wider world is fraying if not already broken.

It's not appropriate in every instance, but once that link is severed, so is our sense of collective agency. We are just atomised individuals with a "personal problem". Oliver Twist could have provided 800 words of misery lit. Instead, Dickens ensured that Oliver's testimony was more: it was an example of the systemic exploitation of the poor, not just one person's misfortune.

Today, mea culpa (or more precisely in Cusk's case, "You, the ex-husband are partly culpa") has become journalism's dry rot. Cheap, easily available and a fake "solution" to the man-made mystery of how to please the female reader (scare them witless by metaphorically fragging them with tales of victimhood?). And some women love it, hence the rise in confessional magazines.

But here is the final irony; recounting tales of impotence (and recovery) often demands an exercise in brute power. This is my story, Cusk says, allowing no other voices that might further illuminate. That can be the ultimate con in confession.

Lucy Cavendish: Everything that happens to us is a potential story

I do agree that the nature of this type of self-centric writing does leave little room for others involved. It is certainly true that journalists and writers are jackdaws and that some of us – and I put my hand up here – sometimes see everything in that way, something to be expressed, worked through, written about. Everything that happens is a potential story.

A friend of mine died recently and another friend said to me: "I wonder how many of you will get columns out of this?" I was shocked at that sentiment but then realised he had a point. His death was written about (not by me I have to say) – movingly, touchingly, fittingly. I enjoyed every word that validated his life. With a cynical hat on, I suppose you could say that confessional journalism has taken all tragedies and joys and all the mundane things in between and turned them in to nothing but stories, small vignettes of our day-to-day lives however dull and monotonous they are. Taken out of context, does it matter that we like eating broccoli (as someone tweeted the other day)? Does this say anything about our society in its wider form? Of course not. Fortunately, I find the broccoli is never offended.

Yvonne Roberts: The reporter has become too much of the story

Perhaps, Lucy, your final comments illustrate why much of the underpinning of journalism has become so weak: the reporter has become too much of the story. "How do I feel?" as a major driver definitely has its place: a very small place. Instead, it has become a bloated part of the mix – an extension of celebrity culture. As it does so, it is dramatically reducing the traditional role of the fourth estate. A role that looks outwards not inwards; that unrelentingly digs deep beyond its own experience. And, ideally, that makes the connections, often uncomfortable to others, that are truly revelatory.

Lucy Cavendish: Real people want real stories

I think journalism has moved on so that the inward has become as interesting as the outward – our inner emotional lives, and the fact that we write about them, reflects the genuine breakthrough that has happened in society. The world has moved on to a state where we are all more emotionally open. Real people want real stories that have meaning to them written by people they trust. They don't want journalists to be in their little world looking out, they want journalists to dirty their hands, to delve inwards and make a real connection with the reader.

Rachel Cusk's memoir of the breakdown of her marriage is a chilly masterclass in emotional dissection

Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights. The opening words here are plain enough – "Recently my husband and I separated" – but by the bottom of the page we are treated to: "An argument is only an emergency of self-definition, after all." On the next page, we are informed that "my husband believed that I had treated him monstrously" but even as the prying fingers of the mind come up to twitch the net curtains of context, Cusk's cool paw slaps them down again.

Graham Greene famously said that all writers need a chip of ice in their heart; Cusk can come across as the most beautiful ice palace of stalactites and stalagmites, and some people find her company, albeit by proxy, about as inviting as a long weekend in a walk-in frigidaire. We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal; this somehow "excuses" what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money. Cusk doesn't pretend for a moment that she couldn't help herself or doesn't know what came over her when she renders down her marriage into material; she does it with all the care and deliberation of a monk illuminating a medieval manuscript.

Though ostensibly both working the somewhat seedy seam of female confession, Cusk is the exact opposite of Liz Jones, which is surely one of the most lavish compliments I have ever paid anyone. This is no sob story of cat-coddling and sperm-stealing but rather a steely refusal to bare all while reporting forensically on the anatomy of a divorce; a sort of dance of the seven veils in reverse. In a Jones book about the end of a marriage, Offa's Dyke would be nothing more than a nasty name given to an adulterous fling of her ex-husband's; here, it's a cue for a quick tangential trip through the intricacies of Saxon power-broking. Raised on the show-and-yell salaciousness of our celebrity skin culture, a person may at this point crack, and exclaim crudely: "Bitch, please – spill!" But settle down and get used to the idea that you're going the scenic route, and a highly rewarding experience will be yours.

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill. I was a little disappointed, though, that she doesn't even attempt to capture the relief, joy and even wonder of divorce, at least on the part of the instigator (which she was). Much sympathy is given to the "innocent" party in a marriage – the one who is left – but no one bothers to put themselves in the shamed shoes of the poor bolter/adulterer, who must perform the thankless task of peeling the clinging body of the unwanted spouse away like a dead Siamese twin.

The (self) righteous zeal of the innocent party is a grotesque spectacle; like Cusk, I have had a dismissed husband accuse me of being a disgrace to feminism because I refused to give in to his every demand. Seeing a Wronged Man acting like Violet Elizabeth Bott with PMT is never a pretty sight, and even Cusk's monumental self-control can falter in the face of it: "I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picked them up from school when they were older. And my husband helped me… why, exactly, was it helpful for a man to look after his own children, or cook the food that he would eat?"

A writer I really love expressed surprise when I told her how much I admired Cusk, offering the opinion that "She can't say what she thinks, only retrospectively garlands it with all sorts of whimsy so she sounds super clever and fragile. I blame Joan Didion." And there is a chapter about toothache and a trip to the dentist which reads like a Craig Brown parody of the over-examined literary life. There is even a bit of banality going begging – "Everywhere people are in couples" sounds like someone is trying to keep down with the Joneses, both Liz and Bridget – which is surely a first for Cusk. By the time sunshine was streaming through the windows "like sun falling on a ruin", the boiler was "choking and grumbling cholerically" and the plaster is "bulging and flaking like afflicted skin", I was beginning to get whiffs of Cold Comfort Farm, which I'm sure wasn't the over-egged effect aimed for.

There's also a rather odd last chapter, seen through the eyes of a hapless eastern European au pair living with a disintegrating family, which had me somewhat confused. I was always perplexed by those ancient drolls who would presume to have an audience in stitches by the act of "throwing" their voices, and this left me similarly baffled. But, on the whole, this is a predictably brilliant book.

Infuriating and narcissistic? Yes, but also brave and brilliant

When a marriage fails, the protagonists usually look for an explanation that will shelter them in their respective differences. Paradoxically, this explanation tends to be developed in antagonistic proximity to each other: it ricochets against the familiar surfaces of the marriage in cruel mimicry of the dependency that is now being disavowed. This is normally what happens. Rachel Cusk, who has particular difficulties in amortising any bit of herself to what might be considered normal, is having none of it.

"My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously," she writes. "This belief of his couldn't be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth."

There's something so vertiginously condescending in this statement that one is almost sucked off the cliff face of the page. Unable to rattle her husband out of his version, she scorns him as a demi-wit for needing a story in the first place. She has "come to hate stories" (how dowager this sounds), yet the context in which she imparts this information is page 2 of a story, this book called Aftermath, with its literary artifice and patterning and stories within stories – a trip to the dentist, baking a cake, a child dressed up as faun, a lodger howling in the garden at night. Indeed, Cusk's story is so important to her that she has created out of it a whole landscape, Cuskland, whose contours and features she has been mapping since her first memoir, A Life's Work (2001), about how pregnancy and motherhood stole her identity.

Cusk's declared interest in the truth does not encompass the low detail of how her marriage actually came apart. "An important vow of obedience was broken," she tells us, in a brisk aside that implies adultery but not by whom. When Cusk is told by her (female) solicitor that she has "no rights of any kind" and will be obliged to support her husband financially (he having left his job to look after the home and the children), she protests: "But he's a qualified lawyer. And I'm just a writer." To which the solicitor replies: "Well, then he knew exactly what he was doing." Passing as it does with no qualifying comment from Cusk, the sheer nastiness of this exchange leaves a stain.

There are obvious legal reasons for Cusk's incomplete treatment of such issues, breach of privacy being one with which she is already familiar (a threatened lawsuit against her 2009 memoir-lite, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, resulted in stocks having to be pulped a month after publication). But the facts, in any case, are not the same as the truth, may even be tangential to it. The truth, for Cusk, lies elsewhere, not in story but in history, in the notion of aftermath that she helpfully identifies (lest we fail to) as "the book's elemental theme".

Cusk's history teacher at school, Mrs Lewis, was a medievalist who celebrated the fall of the Roman empire as if it were a personal triumph. She relished the "darkness, the aftermath" of collapsed civilisations, when megalomaniacal administration and "conquering unity" had given way to the "disorganised life", where issues of justice and belief had to be resolved at the personal level (how refreshing, now you didn't need a permit for a crucifixion). In this vestigial world, Mrs Lewis revealed, mystics and visionaries, and scholar-monks sequestered in tenebrous libraries, were left to explore the mysteries of existence and nudge the world towards a new consciousness.

We are not privy to Mrs Lewis's explanation of what the rest of humankind was up to – that sizeable portion of it for whom the rigours of mere survival could not be exchanged for the privileges of the inkhorn – and one suspects that the teenage Cusk was not minded to linger on their fate. For she had already embraced the nostrum that ruination was a great facilitator, a catalyst for "the dark stirrings of creativity", in contrast to "civilised unity" that was "racked by the impulse to destroy".'

There's something unavoidably Pol Pot about this thesis, and Cusk's fascination with it comes at a very great price. There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion, and nothing more shocking than discovering that this pertains to you. "Why had I destroyed my home?" she asks at one point. It's a terrible and brave question, loaded as it is with the comprehension of having fatally misunderstood something, but what? And then: "I cannot remember what drove me to destroy the life I had. All I know is that it is lost, gone." There she stands, the "untenanted wastes" extending before her. Year Zero.

It's not a congenial place, this Cuskland, with its low mephitic cloud of complex melancholia. If we were only there to witness Cusk dispose of body parts we would scurry away. What detains us is her cool, clinical examination of the remains, the truths that are returned when she scrapes at the marrow of experience. "There is at first a consumptive glamour to suffering," she discovers. "I don't eat, for fear that nourishment will hurt me with its inferences of pleasure." She meets with her solicitor, who is petite, neatly tailored: "I was thin and gaunt with distress, yet in her presence I felt enormous, rough-hewn, a maternal rock encrusted with ancient ugly emotion."

Lying in the dentist's chair she registers the "pulse, the very heartbeat and hydraulics of the day" in the streets below; driving past hedgerows she notes "their mysterious convoluted interiors"; the ring of the telephone discharges into "the smashed days of late summer". This is as good as Updike, and follows his precept of rendering "the small authentic thing over the big inflated thing". Unfortunately, Cusk can't resist the latter. She should have thinned the clots of classical myth, and dumped altogether the bizarre final chapter, with its utterly disingenuous novelistic trick of resolution. This is writerly greed, swooping on everything and wringing meaning from it, transforming it into something else rather than just letting it be. "Life is other than what one writes," André Breton cautioned. Cusk recognises the pathology, struggles to escape it. "I don't want to tell my story," she groans. "I want to live."

She is not a whinger, she does not ask either for pity or approval. Responding to the charge that she had denigrated motherhood in A Life's Work, she wrote, in the introduction to a new edition, "the book is governed by the subject I, not You… I am not telling you how to live; nor am I bound to advertise your view of the world." This is the code of honour in Cuskland: do not to surrender to the opinion of others; the only legitimate identity is the one you claim for yourself; better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

This separatism – ma guerre à moi– has drawn some exceptionally vituperative criticism, much of it driven by the perception that Cusk is placing herself above the social contract rather than outside of it. As a feminist, she wishes to live by an ethos of parity, and to this end she strikes a treaty with her husband whereby "we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female. That was equality, was it not?" The concordat collapses when she realises that the "authority" of marriage itself is oppressive, that "the cult of motherhood", with its "sentimentality and narcissism", is somehow "anti-feminine" and makes her feel "unsexed". Yet when the matter of custody arises, she shocks herself by invoking that which she most disparages, "the primitivism of the mother, her innate superiority, that voodoo in the face of which the mechanism of equal rights breaks down". She says: "They're my children. They belong to me."

The contradiction, the double-standard for which she is so energetically despised is not denied by her. It is mercilessly exposed and anatomised. That's the point: behold the mess, the aftermath. She's a narcissist? Undoubtedly. But then so are we, in our fury that she does not apologise or offer a smooth surface to reflect back an image of ourselves and the contracts we have entered into. The subject is I, not You.

• Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini is published by Faber.

Harsher critics have accused Rachel Cusk of a confessional narcissism that unfairly exposes the private agony of her family

All great art, argues Nietzsche, is a combination of Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus is the god of the truth that life is chaos and pain, while Apollo is the god of beauty and order. Without Dionysus, art is mere decoration. Without Apollo, life is seen in the raw and recognised as unremittingly bleak. Misery is thus redeemed by style. Thus to Rachel Cusk's account of her divorce, which tests the limits of this theory, and which we review today. Can one be too honest, too truthful as a writer? Not that Cusk's account of her divorce includes any expansion upon its causes. Here she remains coy. Rather it plunges headfirst into the phenomenology of pain, which she wraps in a beautifying prose. The harsher critics have accused it of a confessional narcissism that unfairly exposes the private agony of her family. "Children have to share in their parents' destiny to some extent, like it or not," is part of Cusk's mitigation – though her deeper justification seems to be a vocation for fearless truth-telling, come what may. Nothing is unwritable. Indeed, the unwritable is precisely what needs to be written. For it exposes to the light of day the disturbing truth of the human condition. But can children really be counted as acceptable collateral damage in the self-styled vocation of the artist? Whatever the judgment one reaches here, this sort of literature is a high-wire act with very considerable consequences for success and failure. Sometimes too many others will pay the price for one's own cherished sense of honesty.

Aftermath by Rachel Cusk, Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd and London in the Eighteenth Century by Jerry White

"As every reader not living under a rock now knows, the novelist Rachel Cusk has written about her separation from her husband … Passages have been reprinted, quoted, and quarrelled over so much that it is now not just a memoir but a scandal." Amanda Craigin the Independent joined the Aftermath fray: "Her exacting, cerebral treatment of such a highly-charged subject is what makes it of literary value," but the "prurient will be disappointed, and the distressed, unenlightened." Camilla Long had fun with it in the Sunday Times, describing the book as "simply bizarre": "She describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail … Cusk herself seems extraordinary – a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. And while I know some readers will find comfort in her searing, elegiac words, and her 'painfully honest' but extremely fetching dismemberment of personal despair, she leaves out too much narrative detail for me …This is a pity, as confessional writing is meant to be about truth – the whole truth." Cusk uses the memoir form "with great tact and writerly panache", enthused Lisa Appignanesi in the Daily Telegraph: "If her probing is sometimes clinical, it is also full of beauty – the beauty of language struggling to reveal an experience which is complex and scored with doubts and pain."

There seemed a general consensus that Peter Ackroyd's Wilkie Collins was not up to his best. John Prestonin the Evening Standard thought it seemed to have been written "in a bit of a trance": "It chugs along in one gear – a bit of biography followed by a synopsis of a novel, then some more biography – without ever flaring into life or throwing out any startling insights." In the Independent on Sunday, DJ Taylor reminisced: "Only the other day, in a box in the study, I turned up a sheaf of cuttings snipped out of the Spectator in the days when Peter Ackroyd wrote its weekly novel review. Incendiary stuff they were … Of course, Ackroyd doesn't write like that now … the tone of item No 5 in his series of 'short biographies', is incorrigibly sedate." The Sunday Times's John Carey pointed out that "It is not entirely clear that another biography of Collins is needed, since Ackroyd's book, though short and enthusiastic, makes no real advance on Catherine Peters's comprehensive and beautifully written The King of Inventors, published in 1993."

"Jerry White has been unpeeling the history of London in a trilogy of wonderful books that started with the 20th century and has now reached its final volume in the 18th century. It's the juiciest instalment so far in this page-turner biography of the capital, full of amazing facts and anecdotes, a book that anyone wanting food for thought about social history or human nature will treasure." Claire Harman's enthusiasm for London in the Eighteenth Century, expressed in the Evening Standard, wasn't shared by the Spectator'sKate Chisholm, who felt the organisation of the book into themes was merely "an enterprising way to marshal such detailed and fact-filled research. It is, though, a little strange to discuss power through the life of the notorious John Wilkes …" Though "he sometimes overpowers the reader with detail," argued Andrew Holgate, the Sunday Times's literary editor, "White is often superb at summoning up … the city's sheer raw energy. Sober yet incisive in his assessments, comprehensive in his coverage, and gimlet-eyed in his choice of detail, he offers an invigorating yet thoughtful tour through London's most extraordinary and bracing of centuries."

Is this column a betrayal of my family?

I have, finally, weeks after the rest of the world, read Rachel Cusk's Aftermath, the ultra-candid memoir of the early days of her separation from her husband of 10 years. Having compulsively read the extracts, and followed the surrounding weeks of broadsheet polemic about what, exactly, it is acceptable to say about your divorce, I felt oddly apprehensive.

On the one hand, I admit to a queasy, faintly shameful desire to be appalled, to peer under the rock Cusk has lifted up and to be pleasurably disgusted at what she is willing to offer up for public consumption. At the same time, there's the sense that we are writing on the same subject, albeit very differently, and I felt the opprobrium heaped on Cusk rubbed off on me a little: if what she did is wrong – a betrayal – is the same true of me?

Even so, I hoped it would be illuminating, as well as, or rather than, pruriently satisfying. I remember finding A Life's Work, Cusk's memoir of early motherhood, quite comforting in its refusal to sugarcoat the experience of caring for a tiny infant. Yes, it was a bleak and unrelenting, and a somewhat single-note, account of a time I recall as being one of shocking contrasts, of split-second shifts between joy and fear and despair, but, even so, it felt salutary and powerful. Not everyone feels like Cusk about becoming a mother, but those who do, to any degree, might well find some solace in the answering echo in A Life's Work.

So I read Aftermath, fast and nervously. It is raw, certainly, but I'm not sure it is the grotesque airing of dirty linen I had been given to expect. Virtually everything shocking, or transgressive, had already been cherry-picked in the published extracts and the rest is an intermittently uncomfortable, but also reflective, read.

Of course it is bleak, bleaker than A Life's Work. Cusk said it herself in this paper: "Motherhood has traumatic elements, but divorce is only darkness, only trauma." Any account of the end of a marriage is unlikely to be a riot of knee-slapping comedy and Aftermath certainly doesn't shrink from showing divorce for the grey, lingering, frightening thing it can be. I have often wished over the past year – and in this column – that I could be a bit more breezy, a bit more Noël Coward about things, but Cusk's version is quite close to my truth. What she describes – guilt, pain, confusion – is accurate, and probably universal.

She is particularly good on the limping uncertainty of the single-parent family unit in the early months of separation; the dislocation and loneliness, the self-imposed insularity when four become three. The edgy, claustrophobic atmosphere of the early chapters of the book inspired a sickly wave of recognition and recollection, then a sharp gratitude that that phase is finally over.

It's certainly a harsher, more baldly revealing kind of writing than I could ever do: I flinch, in writing and in life, from conflict and unpleasantness, even when it might be necessary or desirable; I'm hamstrung by my need to make things nice, to smooth over. There's none of that in Aftermath.

I don't know if it's brave, or reckless, or oblivious, but I confess I admire it. Reading some of the ugly, illuminating things Cusk includes, I thought of incidents I have chosen not to mention here: a conversation with X that ended with me throwing my phone at the wall in rage; the ongoing discomfort and occasional flare-ups about money, and the house. Even with the security blanket of anonymity, I simply don't have her nerve.

What has stayed with me most clearly, though, is this phrase: "I have jumped from a high place, thinking that I could fly, and after a few whirling instants have realised I am simply falling." Much of the last year has felt like that. I thought I knew how this story, our separation, ended: I needed to be on my own; we would be better apart. Perhaps that's true, but my early conviction that everything would be all right, that it was "for the best" has been shaken, again and again, to the point where right now I just don't know if it will be all right, actually.

Should she have written it? Should I be writing this column? I often wonder, and I don't know. What I do know, though, is that if I weren't writing, I would be reading, in the hope of that answering echo, and the fainter hope of a shred of reassurance that things do, generally, turn out OK.

Lessing's radical exploration of communism, female liberation, motherhood and mental breakdown was hailed as the 'feminist bible' and reviled as 'castrating'. Four generations of writers reflect on what it means to them

Diana Athill

Of course I read The Golden Notebook as soon as it came out. Everyone did. But I took against it. I and most of my friends, who were more or less the same age as Doris Lessing, felt, as she did, that society was in a shocking mess and that socialism was probably the answer, so most of us flirted with the idea of joining the Communist party. My own reason for not, in the end, doing so was that I knew myself to be too frivolous for the necessary commitment, and there was also a streak of something more respectable in my motive: I felt dubious about ends justifying means, which I took to be an important part of Communist thinking. Those of us who did not choose to join the party (the majority) had no trouble believing the evidence of Stalinist horrors that soon began to leak out of Russia, because that evidence was far more convincing than Communist pieties; so I soon became impatient with a book full of minute analysis of the dismay and distress of party members when they had to face the ugly truth which had been accepted by everyone else for years. Their situation was interesting, but not so tremendously interesting as all that. Lessing's involvement with it made me think of the Holy Roman Emperor's supposed comment on an opera by Mozart: "Too many notes." On this subject Lessing had written "too many words".

Her other important theme, the situation of women, would have appealed to me much more if it had not been for the elaborate structure in which she had chosen to wrap it, her tendency to overstate, and her style. This seemed to me often to become stiff, particularly in the heavy-handed passages of dialogue between Anna and Molly. The switches of mood that occurred so often in these were unconvincing and so obviously engineered to exemplify the points Lessing wanted to make. I loved her earlier writing about her life in Africa, which was relaxed and vivid, and which I recognised again when The Golden Notebook's story took it to Africa, but when it moved to London the style became clumsier. It tended to be assertive, and I agree with Montaigne that assertiveness provokes resistance. Although Lessing writes with feeling about the uncertainties and frailties of her women characters, there is a slightly pompous solemnity – almost didacticism – in the atmosphere that prevails in The Golden Notebook, as though its author were not searching out the truth, but stating that she knows it – always a dangerous thing for anyone to do.

Or so it seemed to me when I first read it. Going back to it, I find it easier to forgive the clumsiness of its structure, and that stiffness – to admire the boldness of its ambition and be moved by its passion. It is certainly impressive, looming so large in the landscape of 20th-century literature. But I cannot say that it was a landmark book for me.

Margaret Drabble

The Golden Notebook is a novel of shocking power and blistering honesty. I first read it about five years after its publication, when I was about 30, and it had an overwhelming impact. I remember vividly the state of excitement, terror and awe in which I read it, a semi-deranged state not unlike that of Lessing's narrator, Anna, in her north London flat. Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos. She managed to make sense of her material, but at enormous risk. Luckily for me, I had already published three novels, and I had three children to keep me sane. Otherwise I might never have found my own voice. I might have gone off the rails completely.

It's impossible to calculate all it taught me and the warnings it gave me, but to begin with motherhood: Lessing writes about the conflicts between the maternal and the erotic life, of the responsibility that can keep a suicidal mother alive in the midst of breakdown, of the efforts (sometimes disastrous) to conduct a career while rearing a child. She has never had any time for would-be women writers who complain that pregnancies silenced them or reduced their output: get on with it, that was her bracing advice. She did see the problems women writers face as being different from those faced by men, and although she vehemently rejected the feminist label, of course we read her as a feminist. She spoke for us, in the sexual confusion of the 1960s.

As a feminist and a free woman, living a life of what was then striking promiscuity, her protagonist Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare, shockingly but truthfully, that "every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency." But this same woman (albeit writing in a different notebook, about a later period in her life) is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece describing a breaded veal escalope with mushroom in sour cream, a dish that the defaulting man never turns up to eat. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. It's almost like being in a Kerouac novel. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.

Liberating indeed was all that discussion of menstruation and orgasm and frigidity. These subjects were about to hit the new women's magazines, but they hadn't yet quite made it, and we were enthralled by this direct confrontation with literary decorum. Anna's excessive fear of her own body odours is alarming, and one is not quite sure if it is intended to be neurotic, but at least it is named. James Joyce named defecation, and Lessing named menstruation. As for orgasm – well, we knew about that from Freud and the Kinsey Report as well as from real life, but we'd never seen it written about in this personal, descriptive, anecdotal, confessional, aggressive way. Again, Lessing's views are simultaneously progressive and conservative. She puts sexually conservative views into the mouth of Mother Sugar, the wise old Jungian analyst, but Anna seems to share them, and there is much inner debate about whether a woman can have an orgasm with a man she does not love, whether vaginal orgasm is superior to the clitoral orgasm (she decides it is), and whether a woman needs a "real man". I remember finding this concept of a "real man" very worrying at the time, and I still do.

Anna, in her various manifestations, thinks most Englishmen are not real men. Those few that are real men are unfaithful and polygamous, but most men are unsatisfactory – rude to their wives, unable to give pleasure, bullying, selfish, indifferent to their children, eager to marry a younger secretary. Even the good-hearted ones come too quickly. No wonder Lessing's work was described as ball-breaking and "castrating", a word she often invokes. Experienced women had not written openly like this in the history of literature. It must have been terrifying. The pact of polite silence had been broken for ever.

The insistence on a lack of "real men" spills over into a homophobia more disturbing than the exposure of heterosexual male sexual vanity and insecurity. England is described as a country "full of men who are little boys and homosexuals and … half-homosexuals", and Americans don't fare much better. Anna's lodger Ivor and his partner Ronnie are "frightened men who measure out their emotions like weighed groceries". I noted this censoriously 40 years ago, when homophobia was more common than it is now, and it seems even more offensive today. Lessing has never been much interested in being fair or balanced. Anna/Lessing did note that Ivor and Ronnie's relationship was illegal, and there is a hint of speculation that that was why they behaved as they did. But she disapproved of them. She seems to have disapproved of lesbians, too, although brother-sister incest appears to be viewed as harmless. Lessing's moral spectrum is full of surprises and challenges, and that is one of the reasons why she is such an important writer. She takes little for granted.

I haven't left myself much space to praise Lessing's extraordinarily innovative experiment with the novel form, although this too deeply impressed me when I was young. It is not like anything else: it's in a different league from the other experimental novels of the 1960s in its grappling with narrative, identity, tone, truth. This is not experiment for its own sake, it is in no way modernist or ludic or post-modern, although one of the passages I know by heart is the one in which she writes: "Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want … The real experience can't be described … I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better."

Lessing is relentlessly truth-seeking, not ideologically experimental. Labels such as modernism meant nothing to her. When I was in China with her in 1993, we were introduced to our audiences by a Chinese professor whose specialist area of study was Joyce. He described himself as a scholar of modernism. "I don't call Joyce very modern," Doris muttered, as an aside. She made her own place. She didn't like categories. She didn't even recognise them.

Rachel Cusk

The Golden Notebook is a radical work, whose character nonetheless derives from and is encompassed by literary tradition. Doris Lessing set out to write a novel that was neither morally deformed by the politics and mores of its own reality nor was forced to process the deformity through modernist techniques. But if The Golden Notebook is a consciously traditional text, its forebears are Tolstoy and Stendhal and Chekhov, not Jane Austen or George Eliot. The evasiveness of the English novel has nothing in common with Lessing's personal and political realism at all. Of the English novelists, only DH Lawrence can be found – though found strongly – in the make-up of The Golden Notebook, and something of the loathing and rejection Lawrence inspired was to be Lessing's, too.

The Golden Notebook's radicalism lies not in the author's intention to break with or rebel against past forms, but to take breakage itself – or "breakdown", her preferred word – as her subject. That subject is made concrete in the person of a writer, Anna Wulf, who cannot write. In creating Anna, Lessing created also a distinction of which the book itself fell foul when it came out in 1962. In this novel the artist is not potent but bankrupt. Anna can't write because, as she admits, what she writes isn't true. "The parochialism of our culture is intense," Lessing wrote in her 1971 preface to the novel, in which she confesses that although she believed she had a balanced and indeed humble view of the value of literary criticism, over the hostile reception to The Golden Notebook she "lost it". "There is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap." The narrative's remarkable construction, through which its ambitions "to talk through the way it was shaped" are so brilliantly realised, was – when it first emerged – subjected to precisely the reductive reading against which it militates. If The Golden Notebook has one unmistakable theme, it is the danger of uncoupling the personal from the universal, of seeing the subjective as inimical to – even undermining of – objectivity. The novel's extraordinary achievement lies in its demonstration of subjectivity as elemental, as a life force whose containment, as Anna Wulf has discovered, causes human identity to collapse. "Nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others." Early critics and readers of The Golden Notebook did not see things this way at all. They saw a book by a woman about a woman, and in "personalising" the novel enforced the very limitation against which it warns. Even though the failure of Marxism is one of The Golden Notebook's great subjects, Lessing admits that the intelligent early readings of the text came largely from Marxist critics, who were able to "look at things as a whole and in relation to each other".

Lessing resisted the labelling of The Golden Notebook as a feminist novel, though she conceded that it was written "as though the attitudes that have been created by the Women's Liberation movements already existed". Hence the misunderstandings by her critics: "some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assumed a crystallisation of information in society which has not yet taken place". In fact, what Lessing concerns herself with in the novel is the adjustment of the relationship between men and women as it was being lived in the contemporary era, not its distillation as "opinion". This adjustment was many-faceted, infinitely complex, and her great achievement – like Lawrence's inThe Rainbowand Women in Love– was to posit the individual, male and female, as a structure through which evolving forces and historical currents pass. In a sense The Golden Notebook begins where Lawrence left off, with the idea of "free women" – a phrase Lessing uses as the title of the novel's freestanding interior text. Like him, she writes intimately about sex, parenthood, creativity, work, belief and politics, and like him she does so not through people with enormous power or importance in the world but through a concept of intelligent private life that acts as a prism for these larger forces.

The idea of the notebooks, however, is what makes Lessing's vision even more radical than Lawrence's and it remains of great significance to 21st-century readers. As a paradigm of the modern self, the set of different-coloured notebooks belonging to the writer (and divorcee, and single parent) Anna Wulf continues to serve the novel's themes of compartmentalisation and breakdown half a century on. These notebooks represent the strain to personality of unintegrated consciousness, and it remains as characteristic of (female) experience now as then that what Lessing calls the existence of "false dichotomies and divisions" – the self as fragmentary and compartmentalised and thus as potentially dishonest in and of itself – damages individuality and its status in culture. The artificial-personal supplants the universal-personal; truth becomes intermittent and fractured, calling for madness, breakdown and disintegration of personality in order for division and falsehood to be swept away. The different notebooks can no longer be written in: only the book of synthesis, the golden notebook, has a future. This compelling idea, so classical in its interpretations of violence and change, continues to offer a valid way of thinking about who we are and why. Indeed, the modern reader may find The Golden Notebook far franker, more open, more intellectual and more politically and personally revolutionising a text than its first readers did. She may find it more necessary, or even perhaps more shocking, for it makes our age seem prim and puritanical and half-witted by comparison, not to mention more parochial. Doris Lessing has always been a writer interested in the future, so I doubt this would come as any surprise to her at all.

Natalie Hanman

The Golden Notebook is the book I have given most as a gift since I read it for the first time nearly a decade ago, in my early 20s. If a new acquaintance becomes a new friend, or an old friend is in trouble, and I have not already spotted the novel's reassuringly solid spine on their bookshelf, I pass on a copy and tell them that reading this book changed me – as Doris Lessing said the writing of it did her.

Lessing published The Golden Notebook in 1962, as the so-called second wave of the women's movement was gathering pace. It is set in the wake of the cold war Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist speech of 1956 and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising against Communist rule, with the spectre of nuclear oblivion haunting its pages. The protagonist Anna Wulf – a thirtysomething published writer, mother and political radical – is undergoing a breakdown.

Why did all this speak to me, then, a young woman born under the Thatcher government, raised in comfortable conservatism in rural southern England, and coming of voting age under Blair's New Labour? The context of my political upbringing was shaped by individualism, neoliberalism, consumerism and "post"-feminism; it could not be further from the ideologies held by the novel's central characters. That is, of course, precisely what appealed – John Mullan, in his Guardian Review Book Club columns on the novel, has identified this "vein of vicarious nostalgia" often felt by readers of the novel who were unborn when its defining events took place.

"It's all due to the times we live in," a doctor tells Anna when she describes an episode of madness. When I left school, the Tories finally kicked out of office, I was promised change by a beaming Tony Blair. The times I lived in then felt like a trick. It is too simplistic to say that the communism of The Golden Notebook offered an appealing alternative – especially when any political certainties the characters hold are so thoroughly satirised by the novel's end, with Anna joining the Labour party and her friend Molly swapping political gatherings for marriage – but reading the novel was one of the things that jolted me into thinking an alternative was possible. Its intense engagement with global politics offered sharp relief from the bland cynicism of my generation: even when some young people marched against the Iraq war – to little avail – many more were too busy shopping to vote.

Anna's struggle with formlessness, with the seemingly separate and competing parts of herself, mirrored on a first reading my struggle in young adulthood – who was I, who did I want to be? This was only in part about being, or becoming, a woman. In the novel's 1971 preface, Lessing writes derisively of how the book was "claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war". I'm just guessing, but maybe she bridles at the suggestion that women are the only ones throughout history who have been systemically disadvantaged, or that men are the only ones to do the exploiting. In my reading of the novel, then and now, it was never solely about women and men. It certainly would be odd if a novel full of Marxists confined itself to this power relation alone. Indeed, Lessing has an acute eye for all those small shifts in a room that reveal the many different power relations being negotiated from moment to moment.

The debates Anna has in the novel, with herself and others, I think start to conceive of gender as a relational thing: not just about women, and a particular type of woman at that (white, middle class and so on), versus men, but about all the ways in which people struggle together, through complex intersections of sex, class, race and location. In this sense, it is a mistake to claim the novel as only of feminism's second wave (such clear-cut chronological narratives often seem nonsensical anyway), for it attempts to take "the personal is political" to a more inclusive place than, say, Betty Friedan's conceptualisation of the "problem that has no name". That Lessing probes some of the diversity of our lived experiences rather than only dull dichotomies felt thrilling to me then.

Coming back to the novel now, in my early 30s, is like discovering an old diary: in the writing of her four experimental notebooks, Anna puts her politics and personal life under reflexive scrutiny, with constant self-questioning; in the turned-down corners and scribbled margins of certain of those pages, I tried to do the same. Some of that seems awkward now, and certainly dated. For the times have changed again.

When I reread The Golden Notebook earlier this year, the global financial crisis was being met by an array of inventive protests, and I had a newborn baby sleeping on my chest; now, I write this in snatches of half-hour slots as my four-month-old naps upstairs. The wonderful, frightening discombobulation of early motherhood: how do I reconcile that with my politics, my feminism? Again: who am I, who do I want to be? And is there hope for ongoing unsolved dilemmas – such as childcare, and how best to rethink our commitments to work, home and community – in the fact that capitalism is now in crisis, or can we only despair as it takes ever more vicious forms when under attack?

I did not find any answers in The Golden Notebook when I first read it, nor did I identify with Anna Wulf – Anna Freeman – as some sort of personal feminist hero. I do not think that was the point. But then, as now, it helped to steer me towards knowing which questions to ask, in order to try to do things differently. That's why I gave the novel as a gift, and will continue to do so.

From a meditation on walking Britain's ancient paths to an epic American novel, from reportage on life in a Mumbai slum to a blockbuster biography of LBJ ... writers choose their books of the year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Eghosa Imasuen's Fine Boys (Farafina Books, available on Kindle) is, simply put, a very good read. It is about middle-class life in 1990s Nigeria, boys coming of age amid the lure of violence and the pull of young love. It is moving, funny and emotionally true.

Pat Barker's Toby's Room (Hamish Hamilton) is magnificent; the characters have psychological depth, and she deals, in an honest, knowledgeable way with gender and art during the first world war. I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning.

Simon Armitage

I've become a big fan of the short novel of late, something about the length of a day return from Leeds to London, so Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (Granta)was always going to appeal. Stark and terse, it's the story of 1920s lumber-man Robert Grainier, whose existence is consumed by America's uncontrollable expansion. He is pioneer, dreamer, everyman, and his life among the trees, forest fires and bawdy towns speaks both of paradise and apocalypse, all told with Johnson's maverick approach to grammar and structure.

Often overlooked as a poet now, Stephen Spender wrote over a million words of journal entries. The index of New Selected Journals: 1939-95 (Faber) reads like a cross between Who's Who and a London restaurant guide, but name-dropping and menu choices aside, some of his later writings as body and spirit begin to fail are touching and humane.

InMeme (University of Iowa Press) Susan Wheeler intercuts fragmentary poetic reflection with snatches of vernacular phrasing ("wait I'm not done fucking yet") to explore broken relationships – parental, romantic and with the self. The overall effect is dazzling, upsetting at times, and like nothing I've read before.

Diana Athill

There's been an embarrassment of riches this year, but here are two to be treasured and reread. In Tom Lubbock's Until Further Notice, I Am Alive (Granta) he regrets that no "teaching how to die" is available. His own awe-inspiring book is just that. It is unforgettable and profoundly valuable. While Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines (Sort Of Books), a collection of brilliant and enticing essays about natural phenomena, tingles with life. John Berger called her a "sorceress", and so she is.

William Boyd

Two tremendous new collections by two of my favourite poets enlivened this year's reading. Jamie McKendrick's Out There(Faber) displays all his prodigious strengths – a roving, quirky erudition, spectacularly precise observation and a beguiling, shrewd wit. And Christopher Reid, after the triumph of The Song of Lunch shows in Nonsense (Faber) that he is the modern master of the long narrative poem – at once wryly amusing and moving. Both these poets superbly exemplify Coleridge's definition of the form: "The best words in their best order."

Donald Rayfield'sEdge of Empires(Reaktion Press) is a wonderful history of Georgia, lifting the lid on that country's torrid, rambunctious past (and present). Impeccably researched, limpidly written and full of insight.

AS Byatt

There were four novels I confidently expected to see on the Man Booker lists, or even as the winner. Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life (Fourth Estate) is an extraordinary feat of imagination, telling of the birth of Bangladesh in colour and light. Lawrence Norfolk's John Saturnall's Feast(Bloomsbury) is a brilliant, erudite tale of cookery and witchcraft in 1681.

Patrick Flanery's Absolution (Atlantic) is a wonderfully constructed and gripping novel about betrayal and shadows in South Africa. Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration (Chatto & Windus) is both sinister and sharply intriguing, with a completely convincing 11-year-old narrator caught in fundamentalism, school persecution and the edge of the miraculous. None of them resembles anything else. The fact that none of them was on the Man Booker lists may simply indicate that we are going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period for British fiction.

Rachel Cusk

The best book I read this year was Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family (Harvill Secker); in fact, I continue to read parts of it at regular intervals. It is both an account of mid-life and of childhood remembered from mid-life, with the death of the author's father bringing these two periods into relation. It is what might be called a work of extreme autobiography, and is full of artistic, moral and technical daring. Knausgaard's commentaries on painting, particularly on Rembrandt's self-portraits, are very beautiful. The idea that a self-portrait arises out of an abandonment of the notion of solace underpins Knausgaard's own self-portrait; yet solace is precisely what it offers.

Richard Ford

Lionel Asbo (Jonathan Cape) by Martin Amis – it'd be quite enough for this terrific, boisterous novel just to piss off all the rumpled grumpies and tight-knickered critics who like to tell us what's funny and what's serious (they're almost always wrong). But this novel manages to be both funny and serious, and (as always with Amis) to be very, very on-the-money about the culture – and not just British culture – and along the way to get at what we're uncomfortably thinking and don't want others to know we're thinking. Satire? Fairy tale? Send up? There's not enough of it for me. Amis does the reader a brilliant, generous (and cathartic) favour.

Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber) – I don't ordinarily like reading people's letters. Usually, too many punches get knowingly, smirkingly pulled. Larkin, of course, is different: hilarious, pathetic, niggardly, mischievous, baiting, amusingly domestic, insincere, placating and occasionally loving, and brilliant, incisive and true; he's us, in our best and worst selves – written better than we could write it. Why else would a critic argue that he's the "best-loved poet of the past 100 years"? In these letters, no less than in his poems, he stands rather nakedly before us – only this time with a damp dish towel over his wrist, the room gone a bit too cold, thinking about listening to the radio from bed.

Ancient Lightby John Banville (Viking) – this sumptuous novel has also inspired a lot of chin-pulling and critical brow-furrowing about its "relation" to other Banville novels, and its apparent self-consciosness, and mirroring, and to its being about story-telling itself and the role of memory, blah, blah, blah. Me, though – I just read it for the sentences and the smarts, and for the copious sexy parts, and for the absolutely edge-of-my-chair exhilaration over just what the author might write on the next page. I had, occasionally, to stop reading it, just so I could look forward to going back. Not many experiences provide that much pleasure; and very rarely do we find it available anymore in novels.

Jonathan Franzen

I was taken with a couple of Brazilian novels, not new this year but new to me. Chico Buarque'sBudapest(Bloomsbury)is exactly the literary collision it sounds like, South America meets Central Europe, but what a delicious recipe for a story this turns out to be. Buarque's the real deal, hilarious and innovative and deftly profound. The premise of the novel is ridiculous – a Brazilian ghost writer completes his self-effacement by disappearing into Budapest – but Buarque sells it so well that, by the end, your own existence feels equally ridiculous.

Bernardo Carvalho'sNine Nights(Vintage) is also a hybrid, of fiction and historical fact, and it seems for a while to be treading Heart of Darkness ground, telling the story of a real-life American anthropologist who killed himself in the Amazon in the 1930s. About halfway through, though, it kicks into a more powerful gear. Carvalho starts bringing urgent news of a modern Brazil coming to full consciousness of its double identity as colonised and coloniser, and he deploys his fact/fiction hijinks to produce an ending that is still haunting me, months later.

John Gray

If you want a truly innovative and radical perspective on reshaping the economy, read Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much Is Enough: The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life (Allen Lane). The book has not yet received the wide attention it deserves, but I found the way it applies to some of Keynes's boldest ideas about economics and the good life thought-stirring and extremely refreshing. Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Hamish Hamiliton) is also a meditation on the good life, but one that unfolds in walking as Macfarlane recounts his own peregrinations and those of other wanderers, now and in the past. Powerfully evocative and beautifully written, The Old Ways is a vividly ruminative travelogue, including among its many delights a wonderfully perceptive section on the poet of pathways and roads without ends, Edward Thomas.

David Hare

Two books from 2012 may well be read in 50 years' time. In an abject year for journalism, Katherine Boo's portrait of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers(Portobello), the result of three years' honest witness among the disadvantaged, sets a gold standard for exactly what a gifted reporter may still do alone. You put it down enraged, entertained and richly informed about people who live in makeshift quarters at the end of an airport runway.

Another lasting achievement is David Thomson's The Big Screen. It's always claimed that the greatest critics are the ones other critics admire, but Thomson is that almost unknown phenomenon: a critic practitioners admire. The Big Screen is a one-volume history of the moving image. Nobody else could match its sweep, its erudition, its discernment or its warmth. Give it to anyone who wants to learn about cinema.

Robert Harris

My book of the year, by a landslide majority, was The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in Robert A Caro's vast life of Lyndon B Johnson (Bodley Head). The adjective "Shakespearean" is overused and mostly undeserved, but not in this case. LBJ emerges from this biography as a fully rounded tragic hero: cowardly and brave, petty and magnificent, vindictive and noble, a man of vaunting ambition and profound insecurities. Caro marries profound psychological insight with a brilliant eye for the drama of the times. Two examples stand out. One is his account of John F Kennedy's assassination as seen – or rather not seen – by Johnson, who had his head pressed to the floor of his limousine by a secret service agent, and who was literally dragged to a safe room in the Dallas hospital: a more riveting narrative than any fiction. The other is the mutual loathing between LBJ and Robert F Kennedy, which will presumably reach its full, poisonous flowering in Caro's fifth volume. I can't wait.

Tom Holland

There is a risk that nominating as my book of the year a 759-page tome on the evolution of attitudes to wealth between the fourth and sixth centuries will look like a shameless attempt to get myself into Pseuds' Corner. I hope, though, that readers will trust me when I assure them that Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton University Press) is a masterpiece on every level: one that can be read with as much pleasure by someone who knows nothing about late antiquity as by an emeritus professor in the subject. That it is a great work of scholarship goes without saying; but it is also wise, warm and populated by a truly amazing cast of characters. At a time when books on money are two-a-penny, Brown's book sets the gold standard.

Michael Holroyd

The most powerful novel I have read this year is Jérôme Ferrari's Where I Left My Soul, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (Maclehose Press). It is a devastating story that shows how the victims of torture often become torturers themselves. The most enjoyable novel was Rose Tremain's Merivel: A Man of His Time (Chatto & Windus), which is a wonderfully entertaining sequel to her Restoration. Among biographies, I particularly admired the subtlety and skill of Maggie Fergusson's Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse(Fourth Estate). This is a story full of family problems which she confronts with insight and sensitivity.

EL James

It's been a whirlwind year for me so finding time to read has been difficult. However, I managed to consume Shadow of Night(Headline), Deborah Harkness's follow up to A Discovery of Witches, and what a rich, thrilling and educational tale it is. I graduated in history, so I appreciate the depth and detail Harkness brings to her work. Of course she's a professor in the subject, and knows whereof she speaks. The second in her All Souls trilogy, Shadow of Night finds Diana Bishop, an American academic and spellbound witch, transported to Elizabethan England on the trail of an ancient, missing alchemical manuscript and hoping to glean lessons in witchcraft at a time when such practices could be considered, at best, risky. She is accompanied by Matthew Roydon, a vampire with a well-hidden agenda, and acolyte of the mysterious School of Night. From 16th-century London to Sept-Tours in France and on to the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, we journey with Diana and Matthew in search of the document. It's a captivating and romantic ripping yarn.

Hari Kunzru

I have a notebook where I write down everything I read and watch, the art I see, and so on. Looking through it I see I read very few newly released books this year. One revelation in fiction was Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen (translated by Liz Heron, Verso) an extraordinary novel about the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He's hugely famous in Italy, but frustratingly very little has been translated. I was also powerfully affected by Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing(translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, Granta) which feels, as we move into the era of drone warfare, compelling and morally urgent.

Nick Laird

In fiction published this year, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (Granta) was the best thing I read. Despite its brevity, it manages both to look closely and widely, tracking the history of a labourer who loses his family while at the same time chronicling in miniature the history of the American west. It's compulsive and, finally, unspeakably eerie.

The best non-fiction was John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection of essays:Pulphead: Notes from the Other Side of America (Vintage). Whether he's writing about the southern literary tradition or smoking pot in Disneyland, the man is astute, funny and wonderful company.

The big book of the year in poetry for me was Louise Glück's Poems 1962-2012 (out in the UK in February). She relies almost exclusively on lineation and tone for her effects, and writes spare, pointed lyrics of remarkable power. And Chris Ware's Building Stories (Jonathan Cape) was masterful, beautifully constructed, beautifully drawn tales of domestic boredom, agony and bliss.

John Lanchester

Peter Campbell was a friend and colleague for a quarter of a century, so there was never much doubt that the book which meant most to me this year would be Artwork(Profile), a selection of his LRB covers and other paintings. There's a calm and melancholy and emotional intelligence in his work, which has all the more impact for being gathered together. I sometimes find collections of a single artist's work a little claustrophobic, but that isn't the case with Peter; that must be related to the spaciousness of his mind, his openness, which he could convey extraordinarily well in painting as well as in his writing. There's also the fact, which seems to be more highly valued by laymen than by the pros, that his pictures are very pleasing to look at.

Book production was an interest, and a skill, of Peter's, and I think he would have been very impressed by Wine Grapes: A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz (Allen Lane). This thousand-plus-page monument combines 21st-century science with the ambition, scale and authority of 19th-century scholarship. It may be the nerdiest wine book ever published (and, trust me, that's a competitive title) but it's also a work of astounding scholarship, and as a piece of book-making, is an outright masterpiece.

Another sorely missed friend, Ian Hamilton, makes a startling appearance in Ian McEwan's highly entertaining Sweet Tooth(Jonathan Cape), as forceful and as cool in the book as he was in real life, and in the same Soho pub, too.

Other new works of fiction I enjoyed this year were Zadie Smith's sweeping NW (Hamish Hamilton) and Colm Tóibín's powerful The Testament of Mary(Viking).

Mark Lawson

In a year when the past and present affairs of broadcasting dominated headlines for months, figures from the medium provided three splendidly entertaining books. Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive (Faber), edited by Ben Thompson, finds the morality campaigner comically wrong on many matters but impressively prescient about pornography and paedophile TV personalities.

A front-of-camera superstar, Clare Balding, offers stonking royal and showbiz anecdotes in the sharply charming memoir My Animals and Other Family (Viking), while a behind-camera legend, Phil Redmond, gives a masterclass in media studies in Mid-Term Report: From Grange Hill to Hollyoaks via Brookside (Century).

James Fenton's Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011(Faber) finds a senior poet displaying retrospective and contemporary power; while a junior one, Julia Copus, demonstrates both technical virtuosity and autobiographical courage in The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber).

Translated into English three decades late, Silent House (Faber) confirms Orhan Pamuk as one of the greatest and most prophetic of political novelists, and a timely reprint of Gore Vidal's Collected Essays(Abacus) is some consolation for the loss this summer of a dazzling writer and talker.

Jonathan Lethem

I'm just finishing up Magnificence (WW Norton & Co), Lydia Millet's third and concluding book in her unnamed trilogy (with How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights). The books manage to function as three elegant, darkly comic, slim novels with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and JG Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is.

Yiyun Li

Seven years ago, I had the good fortune to watch a young woman, Amy Leach, defend a collection of essays about nature in front of a committee. From what angle do you approach the world in your writing, one scholar asked: are you an environmentalist, are you a Christian writer, what right do you have to represent sea cucumbers and peas and ostriches and constellations, and – oh, how one has to face this most profound and profoundly absurd question as a writer – what are you? Marilynne Robinson, who sat on the committee too, joined the conversation with a polite yet firm rebuttal to the scholar's question, quoting aptly John Donne: "All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing."

What a joy now to be able to bring together both Marilynne Robinson's essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books (Virago) and Amy Leach's collection Things that Are (published in the US by Milkweed Editions this year and out in the UK next June) as two of my favourite books of the year. The clear-sightedness and articulacy of the two writers; their fearlessness in tackling the questions and issues of our time and other times, our species and other species; their ardent curiosities; their connection to Emerson, Emily Dickinson, to name two of their intellectual forebears – all these remind us how books written not from timidity or narrowness make us feel more alive than we would allow ourselves to imagine. But above all, it is satisfying (and I'm grateful, too, as one of her pupils) to know that Robinson has created a space under which the next generation of writers can continue the exploration.

Robert Macfarlane

Artemis Cooper's biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray) is an outstanding account of an extraordinary life; tender and evocative, without ever hardening into hagiography.

Hunger Mountain (Shambhala Press) by David Hinton – whose translations of classical Chinese wilderness poetry I have been reading since I was a student – is a very different kind of book about walking: a meditative series of foot-journeys through upstate Vermont and the intellectual landscapes of Chinese philosophy.

Lastly, Ted Benton's entomological opus Grasshoppers & Crickets (Collins New Naturalists) led me into the weird world of British orthoptera, with their edible nuptial gifts, "mate-guarding", harems and extraordinarily complex songs. No field or meadow will seem or sound the same again.

Hilary Mantel

Widely praised but in no way over-praised, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Sceptre) is a novel by a young ex-soldier who served in Iraq, and is remarkable for its intensity of both feeling and expression. In this book about death, every line is a defiant assertion of the power of beauty to revivify, whether beauty shows itself in nature or (later) in art. Graves, Owen and Sassoon would have recognised this war and the strange poetry it has bred.

There is contested territory also in Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel (Viking), a visceral retelling of the events surrounding the life of Jesus. Her would-be messiah is a puzzling drifter marginal to his own story; the ferocity of Barabbas and Judas seizes the narrative and occupies its centre ground.

Pankaj Mishra

Anyone interested in modern Indian literature – its history and prospects, how it has been made and frequently unmade – cannot afford to overlook Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Partial Recall, a representative collection of essays from one of India's best poets and critics. Ananya Vajpeyi's Righteous Republic: The Political Foundation of Modern India (Harvard) radically advances our understanding of political traditions in a major non-western country. Revisiting an apparently pivotal event in the history of modern imperialism, Partha Chatterjee's The Black Hole of Empire (Princeton) grippingly uncovers a larger history of power and statecraft.

I found Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to be a stimulating and enjoyable account of how and what we hear when we listen to this great composer. An excellent new translation by Michael Kimmage of Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey Through America (Berghahn Books) alerted me to this wonderful German novelist.

Set in present-day London, Genie and Paul (Myriad Editions), a superb first novel by Natasha Soobramanien, contemporarises with brilliant effect the 18th-century French classic Paul et Virginie. I was also entranced by Marina Warner's encyclopedic and pathbreaking study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Vintage).

Blake Morrison

As a western journalist writing about a Mumbai slum, Katherine Boo had many barriers to overcome. But Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a triumph. She doesn't preach, she's not voyeuristic and rather than intrude on the action she saves the story of her own involvement for the afterword.

Most fiction pales in comparison – not Richard Ford's Canada, though. Despite the material (a bank robbery and two murders), it's the least sensational of novels, gently paced and even in tone. "Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself," the narrator says, and the co-existence of ordinariness and evil is part of the point.

Christopher Reid's collection Nonsense is memorable both for a bravura 60-page narrative describing the journey of an academic widower and for the definitive poem about espresso coffee ("little cup of melancholy, / inch-deep well of the blackest / concentrate of brown").

Andrew Motion

Two of the Mighty Dead have been brought back to life in exemplary fashion: Shakespeare in Lois Potter's The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (John Wiley), which very cleverly uses expert theatre-knowledge as a way of making her enigmatic subject seem plausibly substantial; and Keats in Nicholas Roe's John Keats: A New Life (Yale), which puts the poet properly in his place. And Barry Cunliffe's beautiful and enthralling Britain Begins (Oxford) puts us all in our place.

David Nicholls

This was the year I reset my alarm in an attempt to read more, and I'm delighted that I did. I loved Laurent Binet's smart, original HHhH(Harvill Secker)and, despite never having watched more than 30 seconds of baseball, thoroughly enjoyed Chad Harbach's funny, moving The Art of Fielding (Fourth Estate). Zadie Smith's NW was a fine London novel, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways sent me out on many long walks, and I was both amused and appalled by the anti-hero of Ben Lerner'sLeaving the Atocha Station (Granta). I finally got round to Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dodd's A Monster Calls (Walker) and found it quite devastating, and also discovered the under-rated US novelist John Williams. Stoner (NYRB Classics) is a sort of mid-west Jude the Obscure, and Butcher's Crossingis like a western by Joseph Conrad; both wonderful books, beautifully written.

Lawrence Norfolk

Two dystopian thrillers to begin with. The Uninvited by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury Circus) reworks John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos into a dark parable of psychotic children and their hapless parents, while Peter Heller's The Dog Stars (Headline) might be described as an airborne version of The Road crossed with a post-apocalyptic romance. Both engage deep emotions to spine-chilling (and suspenseful) effect.

The strangest and most strangely beguiling book I read last year was Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman (Pushkin Press), in which a young literary translator arrives in a 19th-century German town and finds himself unable to leave. It is an alluring parable about how otherness at once kindles and defeats desire.

Finally, another encounter with otherness: Bunting's Persia is reissued this year by Flood Editions and collects translations made by Basil Bunting of medieval Persian poetry. These lines were translated from original verses by Manuchehri, who wrote more than 1,000 years ago.

Much do I wonder at one whom sleep bears away
where there is yet a bottle of wine in the house
and yet more wonder at him who drinks without music …

Edna O'Brien

In the great tradition of Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Kevin Powers's exquisitely written The Yellow Birds draws us in to the combat zones of Iraq: the watch, the wait ("Stay alive, Stay alert"), the bungle, the slaughter and the irreparable aftermath. It should be essential Christmas reading for Tony Blair, George W Bush and their cohorts.

In sumptuous language, Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis(Faber)depicts the hallucinogenic sensibilities of those trapped in the opium rooms of Mumbai and by extension, the city itself, with its assortment of broken and stranded people, doomed to live in the shadows.

Sharon Olds's taut and beautiful poems in Stag's Leap(Jonathan Cape), explore the civil war of love and hate in the marital heart. As its title suggests, Sam Riviere's book of poems81 Austerities(Faber) has a wry, sardonic touch, with, however, an underlying power that signals a gifted new voice.

Jeremy Paxman

This was a wonderful year for non-fiction. The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey (Viking) is a compelling story of a family secret. It's been five years since her last piece of work, Black Diamonds (Viking), and I now see why, for this is a remarkable piece of research which throws a bright shaft of light on powerful people, hypocrisy and the first world war.

And the funniest book of the year for me was Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son (Constable & Robinson), a collection of brilliantly written letters from a world-weary father (Roger Mortimer) to his feckless son, Charlie. They could offer a money back guarantee if you don't laugh – the publishers' money would be safe.

Annie Proulx

The Passage of Power is the fourth volume of Robert A Caro's huge and intimate study of Lyndon B Johnson, the deeply flawed president who pushed through a civil rights law and became mired in the Vietnam war. A major work of history and biography.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (Bodley Head) by David Quammen is a cliffhanger account of dangerous zoonotic viruses spilling over from animals to humans, and the researchers who study these pathogens.

America's Other Audubon (Princeton Architectural Press) by Joy M Kiser is the story and reproduction of a rare 19th-century book, Genevieve Jones's Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, today considered a masterpiece. It is a soulless reader who will not be moved by the artist's tragic story.

Philip Pullman

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane contains one of the creepiest ghost stories I've ever read. Quite apart from that, it's a beautifully written, moving, thrilling account of a number of walks Macfarlane took along ancient tracks and pathways in Britain and further afield, shod and barefoot, alone or with a companion. It reminded me of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is.

Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink(Macmillan) is barmy, delightful and spot-on. He laments the decline of handwriting, not in a precious way, not because he wishes everyone were a quill-wielding aesthete, but because it's a human activity that could be forgotten, or ignored, or done badly, or done well, and why not do it well? He also celebrates the great Marion Richardson, whose handwriting patterns used to delight me when I was eight or nine. I'm with him all the way.

Ian Rankin

The novel that has impressed, mesmerised and bamboozled me most this past year is Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway (Granta). It begins as a police procedural, then spins outwards, never quite coming back to explain the mystery. Along the way we learn that a secret cabal of wild animals may underpin life in contemporary London, we hang out at art exhibitions, visit an orgy at a gay sauna, and wallow in gorgeous (if unsettling) writing. A novel or a series of loosely connected short stories? I don't really care. Whatever it is, it's great.

Lionel Shriver

Two novels stand out for me in 2012: TC Boyle's San Miguel (Bloomsbury), an involving historical read and yet another illustration of this author's astonishing range. There seems to be no subject or genre that Boyle won't tackle with brio. I'd also recommend Lawrence Osborne's The Forgiven (Hogarth), a haunting story of expats in Morocco that has really stayed with me. In retrospect, I wonder if the clash between the locals and the western interlopers in this novel arises not because they don't understand each other, but because they do.

In non-fiction, Edward Luce's Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline (Little, Brown) changed my vision of the American future, and not for the better. If Luce is right, there's bound to be a knock-on effect in the UK, so Britons have no reason to read about the increasingly dire situation across the pond with any glee.

Helen Simpson

Some artists – Titian and Verdi, for example – wax stronger with age, and Alice Munro, now in her 80s, is one of their number. The 10 stories and four quasi- autobiographical pieces in her new collectionDear Life (Chatto & Windus) are as deep and surprising and unsparing as any that she has written. In "Dolly", a passionate love triangle, the protagonists are in their 70s and 80s – "'We can't afford rows,' he said. No indeed. I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain."

Ahdaf Soueif

Two novels available only in Arabic. First, The Confessions by Rabee Jaber. Jaber won the 2012 International Prize for Arab Fiction for The Druzes of Belgrade, but I was totally gripped by this early, slight novel, possibly the most humane and understated take that I've read on the Lebanese civil war. And When the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb: a brilliant novel of the Palestinian diaspora. Funny and gritty, and bursting with life and humour.

A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (Bloomsbury) is a small masterpiece; in close-up, a warm and intimate portrait achieved with the most minimal, impressionistic strokes, in wide-angle what its author calls "a zigzag path through the 80s". With lots of those original and revelatory turns of phrase prized by readers of Clapp's Observer theatre reviews.

Richard Parkinson is assistant keeper of the pharaonic collection at the BM and his approach to his subject is empathetic and imaginative. In Eloquent Peasant, he sees the continuity of life in Egypt, uses modern photographs to make points about the ancient text and brings the poem to life and relevance through a full and accessible commentary.

Diarist, nature-lover and lawyer, the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh allows more of his anger to blaze through in the pages of Occupation Diaries (Profile) than he did in his award-winning Palestinian Walks. Shehadeh is always honest, elegant and a heart-wrenching pleasure to read.

Kate Summerscale

Elizabeth Jenkins's Harriet (Persephone) is a fictional account of a true crime, "the Penge Mystery" of 1877, in which a slow-witted young woman was apparently starved to death by her husband and his family. First published in 1934 and reissued this year, Jenkins's novel is a superb, gripping portrait of moral corruption. For more Victorian horror, I recommend Sarah Wise's Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (Bodley Head). Wise is a terrific researcher and storyteller. Here she has woven a series of case studies into a fascinating history of insanity in the 19th century.

Colm Tóibín

The emotional power of Richard Ford's Canada arises from a sense of grief and loss embedded in the writing, and the imaginative sweep of the book, which enters the spirit of a sensitive, vulnerable and intelligent teenage boy and by implication enters the spirit of America itself.

Paul Durcan's Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (Harvill Secker) is a book filled with contemporary life, but the poems also have a way of evoking enduring human values, in all their odd tones and surprising textures, as much as the contemporary moment.

Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (WW Norton & Co) is literary criticism at its most lucid and engaging, as it shows James embarking on his great work and displays Gorra, filled with enthusiasm and insight, as the book's most ideal and intelligent reader.

Claire Tomalin

Two witty books by poets have been companions to me this year. Simon Armitage's Walking Home (Faber), an account in prose of how he took on the Pennine Way, held my interest to the end, partly because I was so pleased it wasn't me stumbling up, down and over the terrible terrain, assailed by stinging rain and blinding fog, and having to read poems to those who cared to come and listen in the evening – and also because Armitage makes a really good read out of his comfortless adventure. Christopher Reid's new volume, Nonsense, is as good as his A Scattering and as funny as The Song of Lunch. There is now no English poet whose work I look forward to as much as Reid's: he has a voice purely his own, and a mastery of prosody. Whether he is making you laugh or smile or shudder, what he writes is the real thing.

Sue Townsend

Have you ever seen Mr Magoo standing on the end of a girder, arms outstretched over the void? Well, I'm Mrs Magoo. I've not been able to read a book without a magnifier since I turned into her 10 years ago. But I didn't stop buying books – hardbacks for preference. I like the weight and the heft of Canada by Richard Ford. It is written with a quiet, hypnotic brilliance that almost had me weeping with envy. I particularly like the opening lines, which take you by the throat and drag you through the narrative: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." At its heart are the Parsons, a dysfunctional 1950s American family. Thank God for dysfunctional families. They are to fiction what donkeys are to haulage.

Rose Tremain

In a year that marked the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, Richard Davenport-Hines's Titanic Lives(HarperPress) was by far the most gripping book on the subject. From his eerily powerful first lines about the iceberg – "There were no witnesses. It didn't look like a moment from history" – he manages to maintain an extraordinary forward momentum, yet at the same time rescue from the deep the biographies of hundreds of people. It was also the first account of the disaster to make me see that the people in the lifeboats were terrified, not only because of the terrible spectre of the sinking ship and the screams of the dying, but also because they didn't know whether they, too, would yet perish. We know that the Carpathia is going to rescue them; they didn't. Davenport-Hines's sense of what to reveal when is perfectly tuned.

A footnote on Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood (Cape), reeling from a Brit-crit smacking: I want to tell readers that there is more dynamism, risk-taking and crazed energy in Wolfe's writing than in all the Brit novels I've read this year.

Jeanette Winterson

Marina Warner's Stranger Magic is as absorbing, wise and playful as the Arabian Nights tales themselves. A book about the triumph of imagination over experience. Don Paterson: Selected Poems(Faber). Been reading him for 20 years. Never disappointed. His poetry is a love affair with life – wide glorious chaotic life. Poetry that "sheds veil after veil". AM Homes: May We Be Forgiven(Granta). Forget the boys talking to each other. This is the great American novel for our time. Adam Phillips: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life(Hamish Hamilton). Freud and Shakespeare brought together for an extended rumination on happiness and hatred. Othello would rather murder the world than change.

Slavoj Žižek

What I read with greatest pleasure in 2012 were the two short books by Robert Pippin, the first among American Hegelian philosophers: Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (Yale University Press) and Fatalism in American Film Noir(University of Virginia Press). Surprisingly for the author of more than a dozen studies of Hegel's logic and phenomenology, the books are about US popular culture: the first deals with the problem of passage from the violence of the Wild West to the modern rule of law in classic westerns (The Searchers, Red River), while the second, dedicated to the problem of subjective agency and fate in film noir, culminates in a perspicuous reading of Tourneur's classic Out of the Past. A Hegelian analysis of western and noir – can one imagine a better combination of philosophy and pleasure? Not to mention the fact that Pippin's political conclusions are unexpectedly radical: the western book clearly demonstrates how the move to the rule of law has to rely on illegitimate violence.

In a more romantic mood, I hope that Alain Badiou'sIn Praise of Love (Serpent's Tail), a bestseller in France, will repeat this success in English. The book is exactly what its title indicates: a celebration of passionate sexual love against superficial hedonism. The true transgression today is no longer sex, but a dedicated commitment to love.

And I was glad that Jo Nesbø's The Bat (Harvill Secker), the first in the series of Harry Hole thrillers, is finally available in English. Henning Mankell, whose latest novels seem to be losing their creative edge, has found a worthy successor in Nesbø's dark police procedurals taking place in a depressive Ingmar Bergman landscape. His later novels, with The Snowman arguably the best among them, bear witness to how there can be more art in a good detective novel than in pretentious "serious" novels.

• Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

• This article was amended on 29 November 2012, inserting Pankaj Mishra's name above his selection of titles.

Buy any of the Guardian's books of the year 2012 from the Guardian Bookshop and save at least 20% (with free UK postage and packing).

Can people really be taught how to write novels? Doubts have plagued the inexorable rise of creative writing workshops. But the cynicism is beginning to look outdated

In F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned, the writer Dick Caramel tells of a conversation with his uncle from Kansas: "All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: 'There's a character for you! Why don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in him.' Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: 'Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a wonderful setting for a story!'"

Anyone who has ever claimed to be a novelist will recognise this exchange. What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it? Dick Caramel's first novel, The Demon Lover, goes on to become a wild publishing success, and as a consequence, Caramel turns into an intolerably self-aggrandising bore. He talks constantly about money and his "career", sounding more like a businessman than an artist, then is demolished whenever he meets someone who hasn't heard of him and his book. Fitzgerald's portrait of "the writer" is as riddling a piece of characterisation as any he ever wrote, empathetic and damning and so ambivalent as to be cruel, almost, to himself.

Fitzgerald, like many writers of his time, went to Hollywood in search of a salaried profession: his friend Billy Wilder likened him to "a great sculptor hired to do a plumbing job". Commentators have expressed surprise at how hard working and conscientious he was as a studio employee, as though something other than hard work and conscientiousness had produced Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. But no amount of toil could disguise the fact that Fitzgerald was no screenwriter. "He didn't know how to connect the pipes so that the water could flow," Wilder added. It is a memorable image, and one that evokes the vulnerability of artistic self-esteem. Those writers who flocked to Hollywood to trade in their one bankable asset, writing, might have come away with the disquieting impression that they were no good at it either.

Today's novelist has what would seem to be a more humane alternative to being a (failed) hack. The ascent of creative writing courses has given writers a different kind of work to do, and is transforming every established role – writer, reader, editor, critic – in the literary drama. Dick Caramel's conversation with his uncle is no longer a stock scene: the writer has become a "professional" with a tenured academic status, a certified technician of language; one would ask him for advice, as one would a doctor, rather than tell him how to do his job. The terrain has become formalised, mapped out, institutionalised. People are paying to have their views about characterisation, setting, theme attended to: if you want a writer to listen to you, you'll have to sign up for an MA.

In one way it's high time writing was formalised: academic institutions offer a shelter for literary values, and for those who wish to practise them, in a way that publishing, being increasingly market-driven, does not. Painters and musicians have long been protected in a similar way – it is both an entitlement and a necessity for creative people to study and refine their craft. Yet creative writing courses are often seen as being somehow bogus, as even threatening those literary principles they set out to enshrine, though the truth is that the separation of literary from popular values in writing has been virtually impossible to bring about. This is a source of great dynamism in literary culture, for anyone can be a writer – at the very least, while the average person believes they could not compose a symphony, a significant minority want to write a novel. There is a demand, among people with little or no track record of writing, to study the art of fiction, and while this might not give creative writing much of an academic profile, it is absolutely reflective of the way the literary world works.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common – the desire to write – could almost be considered meaningless. Moreover, different creative writing tutors will respond to the work presented to them in unpredictable ways. One will like what another dislikes; contradictory advice can be given in two different classes about the same piece of work. So the question is, how can academic appraisal proceed on such terms?

The upper benchmark of academic assessment is that the work should be "of publishable standard", which implies (though doesn't actually state) a touching faith in publication as an assurance of quality. Students are asked to demonstrate a critical and theoretical understanding of their own processes; they are formally entitled to individual attention from tutors, by rota in workshops and by a stated number of contact hours outside workshops; their work is regularly marked, double-marked, and submitted to an external examiner as a failsafe mechanism; marks are lost for misuses of, among other things, grammar, punctuation and spelling; tutors are answerable for the marks they give before a board. Appraisal, in other words, is rather more rigorous than a lot of what happens at an editor's desk.

How are standards – publishable or otherwise – defined? The answer is: by agreement. There is no autocratic way of assessing literature: the shared basis of language forbids it. Agreement is the flawed, frightening, but ultimately trustworthy process by which writing is and always has been judged. When Virginia Woolf read Ulysses she dismissed it out of hand; then she talked about it to Katherine Mansfield and changed her mind. Creative writing teaching is predicated on something like that model.

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of individuality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation and conformity. Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels the need to assert a "true" self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a "false" self.

A piece of music or a work of art might echo to the sense of a "true" self, but it is often through language that an adult seeks self-activation, origination, for the reason that language is the medium, the brokering mechanism, of self. The notion of "finding your voice", simplistic as it may sound, is a therapeutic necessity, and for many people a matter of real urgency. It is also – or ought to be – a social goal. If the expansion of creative writing courses signifies anything, it isn't the cynicism of universities or the self-deception of would-be students: it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

A writer may be someone who has never lost their voice, or has always had it; for a number of reasons, they have withheld themselves from immersion in the social contract. Some creative writing students are already writers, but often they are people whose immersion, conversely, has been complete: they are writers who have never actually written anything. One thing it profits a writer to learn, through teaching, is how fundamental a distinction this is.

Many people come to study creative writing out of a need the writer has wholly internalised. The writer's authority, in a sense, rests on that fact. If the democratic basis of language is what underpins the idea of the "writers' workshop", then in that setting the writer is a free individual, enabling others to process varying degrees of confinement: confinement in artificial ideas about writing, sure enough, but confinement too in the subjectivity through which one very often learns to survive non-expressive experience. Such notions as "point of view" or "voice", while formalised and taught as narrative techniques, are in fact merely lessons in how to exteriorise sensibility, how to make the public persona more consistent with the private, how to put the subjective self to the test of objectivity.

A writer generally has to be alone in order to write: what is interesting about the writing workshop is its communality, suggestive as that is of deficiencies in the social milieux. Alienation produces loneliness, for which, as Marianne Moore said, solitude is the cure. The writing workshop posits a non-alienating social space, and as such creates the possibility of solitude as its sequel; the student who comes to the workshop lonely will leave it, one hopes, ready to be alone.

But to ask the question again: can these endeavours, admirable as they may be, constitute an academic process? What is actually "taught" in a creative writing class? That these questions are asked so frequently is testament to the mystique of the writing process and the degree to which that mystique is socially owned, an ownership that is part of the democratic ownership of language itself. We resist the idea that writing could be "technical": the narrative principle is too fused with our experience of living for us to perceive it as a system of rules. Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them – a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the "true" self. The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free. In the novel that common currency, language, can be exchanged like for like. The novel seems to be the book of self: the problem is that, once you start to write it, you see that it has taken on certain familiar characteristics. It begins to seem not true but false, either a recreation of the false self or a failure to externalise the true one. It is a product, your product: in other words, more of the same. How, then, to produce the "true" writing? "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows," writes Karl Ove Knausgaard in A Death in the Family. "That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?"

There is a spirituality, or at least a mysticism, to this statement that it seems to me ought to be embedded at the core of creative writing culture. The desire to be a published author is perhaps no more than a desire to be "there" permanently, all the time. What the student gets out of a writing workshop is a feeling of being "there" for a couple of hours, the beginning of a process by which "there" – writing – can become a more concrete aspect of identity. One way of getting "there" is by a system of rules that do, broadly speaking, govern narrative construction; increasingly, in my own teaching, I have come to believe that people already know these rules, but only in relation to their own experience.

The natural grasp of form, structure, style and dialogue can be witnessed everywhere in the way we conduct ourselves, and in the high levels of agreement that can be reached about the meaning of this conduct. The smallest child can tell the story of what he did that day, can work out how to make people laugh or how to make them anxious: by repeating his tale he can start to refine it based on the reactions he gets, learn to emphasise some parts and leave out others. The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for "there". Yet the essence of what we know – all that we know – is what it is like to be ourselves.

"The past is hidden outside the realm," writes Proust in Swann's Way, "beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die." The reattachment of the subjective self to the material object is where much of the labour of writing lies – labour because, in this one sense, writing feels like the opposite of being alive. The intangible has to be reversed back into tangibility; every fibre of subjective perception has to be painstakingly returned to the objective fact from whence it came. The temptation is to elude this labour by "making things up", by escaping into faux-realities or unrealities that are the unmediated projections of the subjective self. This is not the same thing as imagination or inventiveness: the feeling of not believing something you are reading arises not from the fact that it is set in Hogwarts School but from the suspicion that it is pure projection. A writer who knows how to give subjective content an objective form can be as far-fetched as she likes. A writer who doesn't can make even the most creditable things unbelievable.

This labour, which is the labour to manufacture a feeling of reality, is what is taught, or at least analysed, in creative writing classes. Is it a science? Yes, to a degree. A well-written text is like a clock: its face shows an agreed representation of a bodiless element – in this case, time – but if you take its back off you find a mechanism that can be dismantled and readily understood. The writer-teacher can explain that mechanism: as in any field, there are people who do this well and people who do it less well. Do students believe that doing a creative writing degree will turn them into a famous author? Not in my experience. It is a course of study, like any other: it adds, rather than creates, value. It offers space, attention, refinement and respect to people in search of "there". More than that, it can offer a humane experience of creative self-exposure, one that the published writer – schooled in the hard knocks of critical reception, or the indifference of the lack of one – might envy.

What creative writing does for students is clear; what it does for writers is less so. Writers become teachers for a number of reasons, though need of money is usually one of them. A desire for social participation might be another, and sheer interest in the subject another. As jobs go, teaching is a good one; in fact, there are writers for whom the absence of a professional "profile" is a hardship in itself. Like Dick Caramel, they configure writing as a "career" full of obligations and appointments, in order to ward off the suspicion of amateurism and manage the insecurity of creative freedom. Respectability, for the creative writing teacher, is more easily procured; but the role of teacher, like that of parent, effectively ends what might be called creative unself-consciousness. The teacher/parent is under pressure to surrender, as the phrase goes, the inner child, to displace it into actual children, to become scheduled and reliable in order to leave the child irresponsible and free. For a writer, who may have fought every social compulsion to "grow up", whose inner world has been constellated around avoiding that surrender, this is an interesting predicament. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. So the writer is giving to others the service he might customarily have given himself. It might make him bigger or it might make him smaller, might betoken richness and maturity or depletion – might represent an increase in self, or might bring about its eventual loss.

How to get there: this is what the student comes to learn, and what the writer has to teach. In the face of such a statement, universities have to – and generally do – remain broadminded. Creative writing can be made more concrete, but not, truly, formalised, for it proceeds on a basis of negotiation and debate among individuals. It has no template: it is an evolving social form. For this reason, the proper home for it is indeed in an academic institution, which can shelter it as a strand of civilisation, an intellectual precept. All sorts of informal "academies" – among others the Faber academy, the Mumsnet academy, and the Guardian's own creative writing masterclasses– have naturally risen in the wake of academic creative writing culture, but it is up to universities to steer that culture, to define and refine it as it evolves.

At an international writers' seminar recently, the talk turned during a panel discussion to the subject of creative writing. A number of foreign novelists were expressing concern about the anglophone domination of creative writing provision, towards which overseas students were being inexorably drawn, even at the cost of having to express themselves in a language not their own. They wondered what the consequences of this trend would be for native literatures, and why their universities could not validate and run courses themselves. One of them, clearly infuriated by this discussion, suddenly delivered himself of a tirade.

Why, he wanted to know, were writers giving encouragement to this abysmal creative writing trend? Why were they perpetuating the fallacy that writing can be taught? Did they really want writing to become a kind of occupational therapy, a tragic pastime for old ladies and bored housewives – yes, he repeated, old ladies and housewives bored of staring out of their windows all day! By now the audience, composed largely of women, was in fits of laughter. Many of them had spent the day attending writing workshops organised around this public event. Yet the more he denounced them, the more they laughed: it was easy to put them – and us – to shame. Thinking about it afterwards, it seemed to me that this mocking discourse is increasingly becoming obsolete. In a way, it is a form of cultural self-hatred. It was that writer's own insecurity that required him to distinguish himself from old ladies and housewives, to be the "real" writer, the centre of attention. He had forgotten to honour the principle of freedom that had permitted him to become who he was. If creating writing culture represents only that – freedom – it is justification enough.

If only more writers were like the poet Sharon Olds and realised that discretion is better than endless revelation

The poems in Stag's Leap, the collection that has just won Sharon Olds the TS Eliot prize, were written years ago, but not published until much later. The delay, Olds has explained, was to protect her family. The poems document the end of her 32-year marriage, when her husband left for another woman, and Olds promised her children not to write about it for "at least 10 years". In the end, it was 15; the collection came out last autumn.

Although the children must be middle aged now and the husband has not, some readers may conclude, done very much to merit such delicacy about his feelings, Olds remains protective. Last week, for instance, she was reluctant to elaborate on her ex's reaction to eventual publication. "It seems to me bad enough to be in the family of an autobiographical poet," she told the Huffington Post. "It's bad enough without me actually talking about it." To another journalist she said: "No one would sign up to be in the family of an autobiographical poet."

Her discretion has, in fact, aroused almost as much interest as her confessions. When autobiographical prose narratives about domestic breakdowns, written while the bruises are fresh and the fellow injured still in sight, are routinely justified as necessary or inevitable, Olds's insistence on delays and limits is striking and, implicitly, a reproof to the fashion. Publishers, at least, must hope it will not catch on.

Supposing the authors had imposed, like Olds, a 15-year moratorium on writing that could upset their children, we might still be waiting for, among others, Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy, Julie Myerson's The Lost Child, Candia McWilliam's What to Look For in Winter and Rachel Cusk's Aftermath. More recently, Salman Rushdie would have had to choose, in Joseph Anton, an autobiography in which no living ex-wife escapes uncharitable reassessment, between the joys of still tepid revenge and his own story of malicious misrepresentation, when his enemies expected him to "keep my mouth shut for the rest of my days".

A conspicuous indifference towards the feelings of the Rushdie wives, who signed up for magical realism, not autobiography, suggests a reading public that is, unlike Olds, increasingly disposed to accept the argument that, to people who belong – or used to belong – to a writer's family, the appropriate response to complaints about literary misrepresentation is: tough. These relations have, after all, little enough to complain about in comparison with the nearest and dearest of confessional newspaper columnists, recording real-time grievances. Moreover – judgmental literalists should understand – creativity cannot be delayed or thwarted. "I am a writer and so that is what I do," Rachel Cusk said last year, after an outraged response to extracts from Aftermath, in which she depicted her daughters' pain and denigrated their father. To her great credit, she made no attempt to defend the revelations as being in the public interest.

In contrast, readers who feasted, in 2009, on the details of the Myerson family's troubles, involving skunk and a suddenly rebellious teenager, were assured how useful this experience might be, should their own lives take a similarly unfortunate turn. "People need to know this happens to families like ours," Julie Myerson told the Bookseller about her decision to out her estranged son in The Lost Child. "When we were in our darkest, loneliest place, it would have been helpful to read a book like this." If this sounds familiar, it's probably because the same argument, or its threadbare variants, featured so often during the Leveson inquiry, as the excuse for invasions of privacy.

In the press's case, of course, reform is imminent. Soon, it will be more difficult than ever for a British journalist to lay bare people's private behaviour because: their situation is instructive for the public to talk about/they are not what they seem/they didn't mind selling pictures of their wedding to Hello! a while back. Last week, in a written judgment, a judge stopped the Sun from publishing embarrassing pictures of Ned Rocknroll, Kate Winslet's new husband, because they added nothing, as the newspaper had tried to claim, to public debate. But the key argument against publication of photographs, which had already featured on Facebook, was the possible impact on Rocknroll's stepfamily. "There is real reason to think that a grave risk would arise as to Miss Winslet's children being subject to teasing or ridicule at school," the judge said, concluding that "the consequences of publication, in terms of risk of harm and distress to Miss Winslet's children, are matters tending towards a conclusion that the claimant's privacy should prevail".

Increasingly, if you wish to embarrass children in public, it may be advisable to be their parent. What the Sun will not be allowed to do to the stepchildren of Rocknroll should still be possible for writers on, say, the Daily Mail's Femail pages, trading revelations about sexless or otherwise flawed relationships, and for the authors of autobiographical narratives, misery and otherwise.

For now, assuming the presence of shared DNA, there is no onus on the author of, say, "My 14-year-old looks like a slapper" to explain why her article 10 justification under the human rights convention (freedom of expression) should trump the child's rights under article 8 (to a private life). A while back, Amy Chua, self-styled "tiger mother", was invited to account for her parenting methods, as opposed to defending the decision to use her daughters like a pair of upscale Honey Boo Boos, as a means to a professional end.

Equally, if more public figures emulate Jodie Foster, whose public defence of reticence was mainly well received, the most likely assailants on their privacy may not be Facebook gossips or a newspaper, but miserable or resentful family members, justifying their conduct as pained altruism or an exercise in the examined life. Will anyone ever write about Padma Lakshmi more harshly than the man who fell in love with her in 1999, Salman Rushdie?

"Everything is copy" is the aphorism generally employed by professional writers attempting, less successfully than its principal advocate, the great Nora Ephron, to transform painful experiences into something with artistic merit. Her own revenge novel, Heartburn, converted marital betrayal into a brilliant joke at the expense of the cartoon-like transgressors, the man, "Mark", being "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind". That the phrase should bring to mind Rushdie's Joseph Anton, whose "needs were like commands", only demonstrates how brilliantly Ephron succeeds in transcending the particular.

Although Kate Winslet's regular duties to fame could not, the judge said, justify exposure of the obscure Rocknroll, marriage to a writer remains a less protected option that the more shy type of civilian might want to avoid. But children can only pray for restraint. The example of Sharon Olds, letting her poems cool for 15 years, shows that it can, even by a major writer, be done.

Camilla Long's scathing review of Cusk's memoir Aftermath draws most blood in contest for the best bad review

Camilla Long's comprehensive shredding of Rachel Cusk's memoir of her divorce, Aftermath, has won her the Hatchet Job of the Year award for the best worst review of the last 12 months.

Cusk took 160 pages to detail the end of her marriage, and how her life fell apart "like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces". Long, in a review for the Sunday Times, takes just over 1,000 words to pull Cusk's memoir to bits, writing the novelist off as "a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish", and who "describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail".

Judges Lynn Barber, John Walsh and Francis Wheen chose Long's write-up ahead of Zoë Heller's dire review of Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton – "an unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book", wrote Heller – and Craig Brown's rejection of Richard Bradford's The Odd Couple as "a triumph of 'cut and paste'" as their winner. The Hatchet Job of the Year prize was set up by the Omnivore website to "raise the profile of professional book critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism". Long, a journalist for the Sunday Times, takes home a golden hatchet and a year's supply of potted shrimp.

"I thought what was wonderful about Camilla's review was that it totally hatcheted the book, but in such an intriguing way that I then thought I must read Aftermath – and did, and loved it because it was just as weird as Camilla said," said Barber. "So a hatchet job isn't necessarily a turnoff."

Aftermath, wrote Long last March, "is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments", including "hectic passages on Greek tragedy" in which she compares herself with Clytemnestra and Oedipus. But, points out Long, despite her mention that she "got into Oxford", Cusk manages repeatedly to give the wrong name for Antigone's brother: he is Polynices, not Polylectes.

Long is also unimpressed with Cusk's tendency to overdramatise: "can a tray of vol-au-vents really be 'steeped in rejection'? In Cusk's world, even the canapes are victims," she writes, while the author is sent into an "existential frenzy" by a haircut, according to Long.

What really bothers Long about the memoir, however, is the lack of narrative detail – Cusk never explains why she split up with her husband, and instead, "we have acres of poetic whimsy and vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains".

Long joins last year's inaugural winner of the Hatchet Job prize, Adam Mars-Jones, who took the award for his excoriating dismissal of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall in the Observer.

Anne Enright, Richard Ford and Rachel Cusk among authors confessing worst literary sins to Dublin Review

Self-flagellation by authors is a long and distinguished tradition, with Tolstoy (who dismissed Anna Karenina as sentimental, "serving no purpose" and "bad") and Kafka (for whom The Metamorphosis was "imperfect almost to its very marrow") among its illustrious exemplars. Yet the appearance of startling ruthlessness is deceptive, as it is a younger self and his or her efforts that are usually being punished, whether by criticism or self-parody. The implicit message is: these are mistakes I wouldn't make now.

The same is true of the confessions collected by Robin Robertson in his 2003 book Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame. Most of the tales of disastrous experiences are from the start of the authors' careers, as with Julian Barnes's anecdote about a literary party that couldn't have gone worse for him, or Margaret Atwood's account of an early signing session in the men's underwear section of a department store and a TV appearance in which she followed a woman from the Colostomy Association. You don't believe the shameful memories still keep them awake today.

This makes the self-rubbishing under the heading "What's Wrong with Me?" in the latest Dublin Review more radical, as the authors who responded to its invitation (to reveal "what they do that causes them dismay, or what they wish they could do but can't") are exposing abiding, apparently ineradicable, flaws – not long-ago humiliations, or callow books, or problems since conquered.

Most of the confessions are nonetheless informal and relatively straightforward. Anne Enright berates herself for punctuation tics ("I am tormented by my need for commas"). Richard Ford is unable to "describe how people look". Tessa Hadley admits to repeating images. Neil Jordan says he has written "a thousand beginnings" but few become finished projects. Ruth Padel convicts herself of "too-muchness", writing too much and overdoing imagery.

Other pieces are more sweeping, more literary in form, or both. Robert Macfarlane mimics a catechism as he asks for forgiveness for portentousness, lack of jokes, "overlarded" prose and other tonal and stylistic failings ("Q. What published sentence do you most regret? A. 'I looked between my legs and saw a whole lot of nothing' in Mountains of the Mind"). Joseph O'Neill seems to channel Flann O'Brien as he wryly portrays himself as only "doing fiction" to "escape the difficulties", creative and financial, of doing non-fiction or poetry.

Geoff Dyer, the only writer to do the double of "What's Wrong with Me?" and Mortification, is also the most energetic self-scourger, noting that he can't "think up plots" or invent characters, and "struggles" with facts and dates. Such weaknesses should be embraced with "gratitude", however, because they oblige authors to "concentrate on one or two little areas that are uniquely our own".

Starting with a confession of "an epicurean attitude to chastisement", Rachel Cusk's contribution touches on complaints that she is glum, prone to overwriting, and depicts "a world without love"; but "my own sense of shame about my writing" centres on thinking that "I ought to write about sex". As her novels have "never" been lambasted for not doing so, this allows Cusk to end with a characteristic flourish, criticising her critics for being insufficiently critical; they fixate on "what is not quite honest", not "what is appallingly true", and so deny chastisement-addicts the Fifty Shades-style treatment they crave, "the cold and clever appraisal that is absolutely justified in its negativity".

There's a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir of breakdown and recovery, concerning alternative titles she claims to have considered for her book. "A few times a week," runs one example, "Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thums Up a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard's rule about travelling in India is a sound one: 'Don't touch anything but yourself.' (And yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)"

The book's actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere, almost reverential: the function of the joke is to fumigate that sincerity regularly to allay any suspicion that the author is taking herself too seriously in her use of it. Not to mention the reader for the words eat, pray and love might in themselves be an invocation of the lost or prohibited pleasures of femininity: hedonism, devotion, sensuality. Without quite knowing why, 21st-century woman finds this a powerful trinity to behold on the cover of a book. These monosyllables govern one another by means of an order both consolatory and somewhat foreign to modern female experience: eating first, loving last, and praying an activity unpoliticised by the female psyche and one she might vaguely associate with being cared for, separating the two like a referee a pair of boxers in the ring.

What is feminism? "Simply the belief that women should be as free as men . . . Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are."

Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman is firm, delightfully firm, on many things heels (against), pubic waxing (against), abortion (for), the disadvantages of economising on sanitary products and she is firm, she insists on, this simple definition of feminism. Feminism is just equality. Would a man be allowed to do it? Then so should you. Would a man feel bad about it? No? Then nor should you. Everything else the pressure to be sisterly ("When did feminism become confused with Buddhism?"); the idea that we should be held to account, as feminists, for every possible ill that could befall the modern woman ("There's a whole generation of people who've confused 'feminism' with 'anything to do with women'") all of that is just hassle in disguise.

Rain on Klopstockstrasse. Light held in misty nets of water above the grey gleaming pavements. And then later the sound of it steadily falling through the darkness outside.

Max's cousin comes: Frieda Halbe, the singer. She is large, Brunhilde-like, with a cheerful, practical face. She has brought with her a leather portmanteau containing various props. It is big and heavy but she has carried it with ease up the stairs.

10 Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, starring Matthew Rhys and Tamzin Merchant, begins and, unlike the book, ends on BBC2.

Creative writing courses are a "waste of time", according to the novelist and creative writing teacher Hanif Kureishi, who says that "a lot of my students just can't tell a story".

Kureishi, whose debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia won the Whitbread first novel prize, was speaking at the Independent Bath Literature festival on Sunday. He was made a professor at Kingston University last autumn, when he said it was " truly an exciting time to be a part of the creative writing department", but on Sunday Kureishi told the Bath audience that, when it came to his students, "it's probably 99.9 per cent who are not talented and the little bit that is left is talent".