4 ideas
Cusk recounts her parents cutting off communication with her as an adult, sending her 'to Coventry'. She says she does not know where the phrase comes from, and she dwells instead on the city's bombing in 1940. Her account presents family silence as a punishment she has little way to answer.
Cusk connects being sent to Coventry with being shut out of the family's version of events, which the silencers continue to tell without her. The punishment's force, in her account, depends on how much the excluded person still needs the family's acceptance.
Cusk explores how the enclosed, anonymous space of the car can loosen people's usual social restraint and let aggression and fear surface on the road. She also questions whether such behaviour reveals a person's stable character as directly as it seems to.
Cusk connects rudeness with the public hostility of the Brexit period. She also asks who gets to call another person rude, and whether what looks like rudeness is sometimes an expression of truth.