Discipline

When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story?

Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel – a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming.

Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor’s isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she’s worked so hard to create.

Taut and provocative, Discipline walks the lines between creativity and control, truth and memory, coercion and desire.

Author Biography

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Aperture and elsewhere. Discipline is her first novel.