Cusset's work has been translated into 22 languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese).

Cusset holds two PhD's: one from Paris Diderot University (Paris VII), where she wrote a dissertation on Marquis de Sade (La raison et la fiction dans L'Histoire de Juliette), and one from Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation on the 18th-century libertine novel (No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment).

Based in the United States for the past 30 years (with interludes in Prague, 1997–1999, and London, 2011–2013), she now lives in Manhattan with her American husband and daughter and spends her summers in Brittany, France.

Catherine Cusset entered the French literary scene with La Blouse Roumaine, published in 1990 by Philippe Sollers in his collection L'Infini at Éditions Gallimard.

The narrator, Marie (a recurring name in Cusset's novels), addresses herself from the United States to her Parisian spiritual mentor whose silence obsesses her, whose contempt she imagines, while seeking the means to finish off with him.

Through a mosaic of scenes related to sexuality, Jouir sketches the portrait, in raw and incisive language, of a woman caught between the strength of her desire and her fear of betraying.

Exploring mother-daughter relationships over the course of three generations, Cusset's tragicomic family saga spares the reader no detail - the wedding night of the parents, the mother's issues related to digestion, or the grandmother's agony at the hospital.

Confessions d'une radine, published in 2003, continued Cusset's work of autofiction and self-criticism with a sequence of funny and spicy stories that probe self-hatred related to money - a topic that may be even more taboo than sex.

A mix of autobiographical inspiration and novelistic writing, Un brillant avenir traces the life of a woman born in 1936 in Romania from where she eventually fled with her Jewish husband to emigrate to the United States.

New York, Journal d’un cycle, published in 2009, is a story with photos that appeared in the collection "Traits et portraits" directed by Colette Fellous at Mercure de France.

It describes a couple's quarrels around the desire for a child, set in a New York landscape made up of violence, intensity of movement, and unexpected apparitions.

Une éducation catholique, published in 2014, tells the childhood story of the narrator, Marie, brought up by a practicing Catholic father and an atheist mother of Jewish origin.