Outline

Author: Rachel Cusk

Outline is a novel in ten conversations, economical and clear in style, tracking a novelist teaching a creative writing course during a very hot summer in Athens. She guides her students through narrative exercises and meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the sea with her neighbor whom she met on the plane. The people she meets talk at length about themselves, their fantasies, their anxieties, their favorite theories, their regrets, and their longings, while the main character, the narrator, remains silent most of the time, lurking in the shadows. Through the confessions of the other characters, the narrator's outline is drawn by analogy and comparison, a portrait of a woman learning to confront a great loss. Outline is an attempt to fill silence and void, an intense, sharp, and surgically precise exploration of many issues such as the experience of loss, the difficulty of intimate relationships, marriage and divorce, feminism, motherhood, writing, and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is the first book in a small but conceptually intricate and unique trilogy, a tightly constructed trilogy that literature will remember as one of the most important literary achievements of our time.