Praise for In the Cut

‘A true original . . . Disturbingly dark, explosively violent, powerfully erotic and brilliantly written’

Sunday Times

‘Not a word is wasted in this examination of one woman’s sexual odyssey as Moore builds to a shattering climax’

Sarah Hughes, The i

‘In the Cut resonates anew in a culture sharply attuned to the violation of female bodies. Moore’s prose is just extraordinary. The final scene is unlike any written in a modern novel’

Metro

‘An uncompromising excavation of the darker reaches of female desire, and an uncomfortably heightened depiction of what it is like for a woman to feel endlessly watched and menaced by men. Its ending is one of the most devastating things I have ever read’

Irish Times

‘A gorgeously written, pitch-black fever dream of a novel . . . Hot and claustrophobic . . . I was scandalised and entranced by its gruesome violence, its genuinely sexy sex scenes . . . Thrilling, radical and peculiarly permissive. It also has one of the most stark and bleak, yet beautifully written endings, of any book I have ever read’

Lara Williams, Grazia

‘In the Cut works because it plays on some of our darkest and most realistic fears, forcing us to consider whether our suspicion of men in individual cases is warranted, or rather the product of deep-seated anxieties. If Sex and the City, which aired three years after In the Cut was first published, explored the complications of women’s sexual liberation, then Moore’s novel explores its dangers’

Natalie Olah, New Statesman

‘In the Cut is deeply, achingly erotic; not in spite of, but because of its acknowledgement that violence hovers all around . . . In the Cut is a thriller, and it is laced with fantasy. But it’s horribly, beautifully real’

Katherine Angel, The White Review

‘The bold, feminist psychosexual thriller you need to read now. How I felt reading In the Cut: titillated, feverish and ravenous . . . I know I will be sending copies to friends who are ready to talk about what justice looks like now, how our sex lives might look in the future, and whether the violence that has conditioned so many women’s lives will ever end’

Kuchenga, Vogue

‘Brutal, witty and electrifying, one of the best and bleakest thrillers I’ve ever read. As stylish as Chandler, as savage as Dworkin, its uncompromising portrait of the erotic dynamic between men and women makes it essential reading in the dark waters of the 21st century’

Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

‘Shocks in a way I’d forgotten was possible. Taut and filthy and beautifully written’

Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock

‘Surely one of the most underrated books of all time. Moore navigates the claustrophobic streets of a seedy New York and the dark, hidden avenues of female desire, rewriting the thriller template with an elegance that proves totally devastating. She looks unflinchingly towards the darkness and finds beauty there as well as old, inescapable truths about what it means to be a reckless woman in a world of dangerous men’

Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

‘I am in awe of In the Cut, a book about violence and sexuality that pays meticulous attention to language in a sharp, sardonic voice that calls to mind Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis. It is extraordinarily unrestricted about female desire and sexuality, a completely propulsive reading experience and simply one of my favourite books’

Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy

‘Horrific, the sexiest book ever, vile, devastatingly true, not for the faint-hearted’

Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

‘Strange, uncomfortable, compelling, shocking, hot, scary. The scariness of the book arises from what feels like being trapped in the protagonist’s head – the way she treats the people around her like specimens, as though she’s conducting a forensic autopsy on the world’

Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person

‘This book will keep you up all night and give you chills. Both relentlessly menacing and transgressively brilliant, In the Cut is a twisty, nerve-shredding reading experience’

Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

‘A streamlined and elegant meditation on language, sexuality and violence. Flawless’

May-Lan Tan, author of Things to Make and Break

‘Riding shotgun on Frannie’s chaotic descent is a difficult experience to shake. In the Cut is voyeuristic in content and by design, making us more queasily complicit with every page turned (and they turn fast)’

Chris Power, author of Mothers

‘In the Cut blew me away. It’s truly extraordinary. It reminds me of Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love – this profoundly clever woman with her life in her hands’

Lucie Whitehouse, author of Before We Met

‘Claustrophobic, disorienting, nauseating – In the Cut takes you to the place where desire transforms into fear, and it holds you there’

Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

‘Deep red and hot as hell, In the Cut is one of the most X-rated, unforgettable examinations of straight, white female fragility, its depravities and desires, but above all, its breathtaking certainty of its own innocence, that I have ever read’

Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

INTRODUCTION

“I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.” So begins In the Cut, Susanna Moore’s devastating 1995 novel on which Jane Campion’s 2003 film is based. I would call it a subversive masterpiece, but I imagine Frannie, Moore’s narrator, would bristle that “master” means male teacher.

The novel follows Frannie, a divorced 34-year-old English teacher living alone in New York, as she becomes entangled in a murder investigation. She half-sees a woman fellating a man in the basement of a bar and later discovers that the mystery woman has been murdered. The book is sexy and violent, on the knife edge between desire and danger, but it’s also interested in the framing of these kinds of stories: on the opening page, Frannie deliberates over giving her students certain texts to read as “they would be so sensibly outraged by the beating, murdering and dismemberment of women that they might not be able to see the intelligence in the books.”

I reread In the Cut in 2020 as campaigners are attempting to change the law that allows “rough sex” as a defence in murder cases, after the deaths of Grace Millane and other women, and the questions it raises about why stories featuring murdered women remain so enduringly popular are painfully timely. But to focus exclusively on the erotic or violent elements of the novel, as much of its initial reception did, is to miss the provocative things it says about power and gender more broadly—from its depiction of a misogynistic, corrupt and racist police force to Frannie’s moments of complicity.

In her increasingly intimate dealings with the homicide detectives, Frannie does not reveal herself to be a witness to the encounter in the bar, having seen only the kneeling woman’s back and the lower half of the man. And though she begins to suspect Detective Malloy, now investigating the murder, to be the shadowy recipient, maybe even the killer, the two begin a sexual relationship.

Partly because it was written by a woman, and partly due to these narrative decisions, In the Cut confounded early readers’ assumptions. Frannie is a hard-boiled heroine alive to nuance, who resists literary and social convention. Putting oneself in harm’s way, as Frannie insists, is not the same as consenting to be harmed. I hope this message is clearer on its reissue, but it is still difficult to categorize the book. Imagine Gone Girl had it been co-written by Mary Gaitskill and Lydia Davis and you’re heading in the right direction. Kristen Roupenian called it “compelling, shocking, hot, scary;” Olivia Laing found the reading experience “electrifying.” Yet when she wrote it, Moore was known for a trilogy of books set in her native Hawaii, about children and mothers, lush Hawaiian landscapes and flowers.

Today, speaking to me from New York, she says she realized she had been pigeon-holed as a women’s writer. “As I found that quite limiting, I decided that I would write a noir thriller, which is more commonly associated with male writers. It was a very conscious decision to make it as tough and as erotic as possible.” Frannie’s voyeurism, wanting all the gory details from Malloy, is a way of bearing witness.

Early 1990s New York was a time of relentlessly violent headlines. In the novel, Malloy tells Frannie that his old partner was the cop who came up with the “rough sex” defence in the real life 1986 case of Robert Chambers, who strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park. The media called him the “Preppy” murderer, while Levin was posthumously victim-blamed with headlines such as “How Jennifer Courted Death.” Moore is hypersensitive to the effect of such language—whether weaponized against women or by them. With her black student, Cornelius, for example, Frannie (who is white) claims to use language “in a way that is ironic, and playful”, so as to rebalance the student/teacher relationship, a gesture which Cornelius sees through immediately. He is one of her “guinea pigs”, he says, exploited for entries she is compiling for a dictionary of street slang and, he correctly assumes, his sexuality. “Cornelius was brazen. Brazen is a good word. I was brazen,” Frannie says, unable to stop herself kissing him.

When Moore writes about sex, all ornament is stripped away. Her ear is pitch perfect, and she is just as attuned to the power of innuendo and suggestion. The title of the novel itself is taken from the slang Frannie collects. “In the cut. From vagina. A place to hide. To hedge your bet. But someplace safe, someplace free from harm.” Moore heard the phrase on one of the first trips she made with the homicide detectives she shadowed for her research, and knew immediately that she had her title, even before she had a character. Language is Frannie’s hiding place, but the book deftly uses it to expose the matrix of class, gender and race through which it operates.

Moore taught writing in prisons and women’s shelters, and wanted to write not just about the violence women suffer but “their realization that there’s little that can be done about their vulnerability and powerlessness. The police, at least then, in the 1990s, were not particularly keen to help when women arrived at a police station to report a rape or an assault. Just recently in the New York Times, there was an article about a survey taken at 33 universities and colleges in the US—from Georgetown to Brown, Yale and Harvard—and the results revealed that, even now, the majority of students do not seek assistance from their university or the police after a sexual assault. So has it changed? Yes, of course, and the #MeToo movement has made a difference, but I was very shocked by the results of the survey.”

What is more shocking about the book now than in 1995, then, is not the violence, or the fact of a woman having sexual desire, but how little else has changed—from misogyny to the futility of reporting it. Moore tells me that if she could edit the book now, she would want to make it clearer that Frannie is no masochist, as many early readers labelled her because she appears to lack a desire for self-preservation. Walking home alone at night in certain areas of New York was assumed to be a death wish, rather than a feminist insistence on personal freedom. Given the media response to Millane’s death—as if the combination of independent travel and interest in BDSM amounts to guilt for her own murder—we still have a way to go.

In her own life Moore has “gone back and forth between the necessity to protect myself, and a defiant, even reckless refusal to take responsibility for what men do ... and I hope that conflict is evident in the book.” I tell her it is. “I’m not careful enough,” Frannie says after the first murder. “I shouldn’t take the subway. Shouldn’t talk to strangers. Should lock the door ... Well. I don’t think double-locking my door is going to keep me, or anyone else, alive ... I refuse to be intimidated. I will be careful, more careful than I have been. I will practise a more sustained, more attentive listening, but I am not going to change the way that I live.”

I found a TV interview Moore did in 1995. She is poised and articulate, but the interviewer makes her, and me, increasingly uncomfortable. He has read her book as titillation, as she later tells me many men did. He takes it as an invitation to discuss the author’s sex life on national television, using his position to attempt the seduction and/or humiliation of his now trapped guest. As if by being a woman who dared to write about sex, she’s asking for it. He doesn’t seem aware it’s precisely this kind of dynamic Moore rages at in the book that he’s pretending to discuss. His name is Charlie Rose and it’s only later I make the connection. Rose was fired from CBS News and PBS in 2017, the day after the Washington Post published allegations of sexual harassment.

Frannie negotiates a similar minefield with the detectives, if not all the men in the book: when to stand up for herself and when to be jocular and accommodating. It’s difficult to discuss In the Cut without spoiling the ending, which is like nothing else. Suffice to say it’s pretty nihilistic. “I believe that they get you either way,” Moore says. “They get you if you’re careful—if you try to protect yourself—and they get you if you’re reckless. Either way they’re going to get you. And that is pretty dark. The book offers no consolation.” We need books like In the Cut now not simply because it’s a cult classic, both timeless and timely, nor even for hope in the dark, but to allow us to articulate that darkness.

Olivia Sudjic, 2021