Outline of My Lover

"This slim novel, the story of an obsessive love between a young man and the older musician who keeps himself at a distance, is a pitch-perfect summer read: it’s intense, sexy, gratifying even while it’s breaking your heart."

—Corinne Segal, Literary Hub

"I’d internalized something from Outline of My Lover, less a lesson than a sensibility, or maybe a hunger. From a permission it had become a goad: write well, or why write anything?"

—Hugh Ryan, Literary Hub

“There is a reverence in Douglas Martin’s writing composed of equal parts language and love. Outline of My Lover strips away the dross, leaving you with the pure mood of youth.”

—Dale Peck

“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.”

—Michelle Tea

"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."

—Tommy Pico

“Spare and elegant, Martin’s book is a worthy companion piece to Duras’ The Lover. It is his elegy on passion and loss.”

—Darcey Steinke

“Douglas Martin has a very beautiful voice. It is a thing of grace.”

—Dennis Cooper

"This book is full of hard-won, fraught, unsparing emotional truth. It is a love story between a raw and damaged boy-narrator and a famously mysterious rock star. But more than that, it is a piece of stylish and ferociously sharp prose. I love its fierce concentration and levels of obsession."

—Colm Tóibín