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The closest it comes to a narrative arc is the friendship the narrator strikes up with a man she encounters on the flight from London to Athens.

Life is also fiction, as we spin our own histories for public consumption, withholding some details, embellishing others we are authors of our own life narratives.Īnd much like life, Outline does not have a discernible plot. As she says, a "marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is mostly mysterious." Most of the people with whom she converses are profoundly affected by their own unsuccessful relationships, and there is much discussion about the myriad reasons a relationship fails.įor many of her conversation partners, and for the narrator herself, the craft of writing and the art of living are deeply intertwined. What we do learn over the course of these conversations is that she has come to Athens to teach a weeklong course called "How to Write," she has two children, and her marriage has recently broken up, for reasons as unfathomable as those why people come together in the first place. Through the course of the narrator's conversations with various people, most of them writers or students of writing, we come to know her innermost thoughts and preoccupations, though we have no idea what she looks like, nor do we glean other minutiae authors usually employ to define their protagonists. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her.a sense of who she now was."Īnne's description of herself could just as easily be the reader's characterization of the novel's first-person narrator, a British writer whose name is only mentioned once blink and you miss it. "In everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative.she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. The more he talked about his life, the more he defined hers. Toward the end of Rachel Cusk's latest novel, Outline, a playwright named Anne describes a conversation she had with a stranger sitting next to her on an airplane.