Outline of My Lover is a book "full of hard-won, fraught, unsparing emotional truth" (Colm T ib n). Set on the fringes of a music scene in a Southern college town, a young student driven to flee a troubled adolescence and a well-off, established artist-musician form a relationship through a pattern of sex and reticence, impacting both their lives and soon shifting expectations. Written "as if telling the truth was a matter of survival" (Andrew O'Hagan), it is a bildungsroman and love story where to separate one from the other becomes impossible.