Outline

Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public enactment of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice and the ultimate value of suffering.