Discipline
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 5 Feb 2026
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. On Christine's book tour, she takes stock of her motivations for writing the novel, reexamines her connection to the work of the artists who shaped her, and reflects on how she floundered in art school until a popular professor began consistently praising her work and extending invitations to his home for social gatherings. After they had sex, he stopped contacting Christine, causing her to spiral and cease painting altogether ("It was too hard to decouple my work from my body, which felt like something I was carrying around, burdened with and stained by association"). Pham's novel takes a dramatic turn when Christine begins receiving cryptic messages from the professor, who invites her to visit him in Maine. It's a page-turner, but the main event is Christine's meditations on art, ambition, and the relationship between art and life, as when she looks at the photorealistic paintings of Vija Celmins ("I had never truly tried to replicate life the way Celmins did, in its exactitude, down to the finest detail. But I did think there was something important, maybe even necessary, in trying to make something that depicted, even if not life as it was, then life as how it felt"). This is electrifying.
