Mireille Juchau

During my childhood in Castle Hill, a western Sydney suburb of housing developments, colonial weatherboards and bush blocks, I walked…

Reality is one of Outline’s key themes and it extends beyond the content and the characters’ concerns, calling into question the very idea of the novel. This existential inquiry is embedded in Outline’s autofictional approach.

‘Why do you invent … and tell lies?’ So asks Reno, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. She has come home with the artist Ronnie Fontaine after a dinner party, during which he told an epic tale. ‘They aren’t lies,’ replies Ronnie. ‘They’re a form of discretion.’

‘How do we live through the losses we know are going on all around us, a sense of calamity that is not new to our age but which is newly pervasive of our atmosphere, the earth under our feet? In the face of this, Mireille Juchau’s fiction presents art not as self-realisation but rather as a vital way of paying attention to the world — and the people — around us.’