Larissa Pham’s Discipline is a simmering exploration of what it means to lose control of the narrative that you wrote to survive. The narrator, Christine, has published a debut novel that both remembers and rewrites her painful relationship with her professor in art school.
The experience led her to abandon painting altogether because “it was too hard to decouple the work from my body”. A decade on, Christine is still living in the shadow of that shame. But her new medium of writing allows her finally to examine what happened.
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During Christine’s book tour across America, she meets strangers and exes. These encounters help her to dissect the possibilities that this professor snuffed out. She faces scrutiny from readers who appear titillated by the autobiographical elements within her fiction – extracts of which preface each chapter in distorting mirrors that offer her imagined revenge.
During a discomforting meeting with Frances, formerly an elusive classmate, now a feted painter, Christine mulls the complications of crafting work shaped under a white gaze.
In a disquieting turn, Christine is staggered to receive an email from her professor, who has read her book and claims: “That’s not how I remember it.”
