For many years, I refused to read novels about writers. As a novelist, I thought the subject was perhaps the last resort of the unimaginative. In the last couple of years, however, I've been drawn to novels about writers--including the gorgeous Don't Be a Stranger by Susan Minot, The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf, and The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz. Now I'm hooked.

I was fortunate to snag a review copy of Discipline, the debut novel by the author of the essay collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy. The novel opens with the narrator, Christine, losing her luggage on a cobbled-together tour for her second book.

Discipline is comprised of a series of conversations about writing, art, and the after-effects of the narrator’s affair with a professor, “the old painter,” which led her to drop out of art school years before. The professor appears in the narrator’s first novel, and the fictional version of him comes to a terrible end. The real-life professor contacts the narrator while she’s on tour for the second book, after discovering his fictional murder. If it sounds like a bit of origami, it is. At times it feels as if the narrator is talking directly about the novel we’re reading, even though she is ostensibly talking about the first novel, the (fictional) novel-within-the-novel.

The writer-protagonist of Discipline speaks frankly about how much of ourselves writers put into our work, and how blurred the line between fiction and autobiography can become.

I find the directness and simplicity of Phan’s writing appealing, and the conversations about writing and being on book tour feel like a walk through a familiar landscape. Anyone who has lived for a time in the literary world will recognize the unglamorous life of the author trying to sell a few books. The power dynamic between “the old painter” and the narrator during her student years will, no doubt, feel like a page torn from the personal histories of many women who pursued degrees in creative writing and the arts in a different, looser era. The narrator speaks at length about the writing life in a way that is instantly recognizable and, for those of us long in the trenches, nostalgic.