Outline of My Lover

Douglas Martin takes you through the heat of family, the electricity of want, and the watch-what-you-wish-for gift of an elusive, famous, lover. This novel feeds you.

Outline of My Lover was the first book I read when I moved to Brooklyn. For me, it isn’t just a “queer story” or a “queer narrative” or “queer characters.” It queered structure. It queered syntax and vocabulary. It queered tense. It gave me permission to question and fuck with and break from the literary structures that were built to keep my voice and my experience and my life and my thought process on the margins. The story told me: Tell your own. Even, and especially if, it occurs strangely to you. Told me: Map your strangeness in words. Told me: Keep going. Keep going. Keep. Going.

…Was it non-fiction published as fiction that read as poetry? Or fiction that drew on nonfiction for its content and poetry for its form? It was genre-queer before we knew the term, and the undeniable physical fact of its uncategorizable existence was (to us) permission in material form: write well, and you could write anything.