A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a "lit world phenom" (Harper's Bazaar).
I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. But I don't know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow.
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers-about how to live a good life and what it means to make art-through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends.
But when the antagonist of her novel-her old painting professor-reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.
A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release. 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, The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Aperture, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches at the New School's MFA in creative writing. Discipline is her first novel.
