Outside the Lines
Featured Book: Outside the Lines
Available for Purchase.
Newly released on October 3, 2025
A Tale of Love and Complexity
Outside the Lines is the poignant and intricate story of a secret love affair between two women set in the 1980s. Maddie, a photojournalist from an aristocratic New England family, is ten years older, married, and has two children, while the author, Helen, the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, is an attorney working at a public defender’s office in Boston. Their paths cross in a writing workshop, where the narratives they craft reveal shared histories of family secrets and a deep, albeit perplexing, connection to the Holocaust.
As their bond intensifies, Maddie and Helen are forced to confront societal taboos, their own identities, and the fragile dynamics within their families. Their clandestine love unfolds in the shadow of homophobia, adding layers of conflict and concealment. The narrative takes a profound turn when a terminal illness emerges, reshaping the relationships between the two women and their families in unexpected ways.
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“The intersection of heartbreak and humor: that’s the sweet spot that Helen Fremont nails with such devastating effect in her new memoir “Outside the Lines.”
“By turns deeply funny and deeply sad, Helen Fremont has written a moving and engrossing love story.”
“Long before words like “adulting” or “throuple” entered contemporary parlance, Helen Fremont was a young lawyer negotiating romance (in an era still largely unenlightened about same-sex love) and forming an identity (despite a shaky understanding of her past). Enter a love affair with a married friend and a devastating health diagnosis to create an atypical story of responsibility, ambition, and love. I started this book when I had other things to do, but then couldn’t put it down, so read in a single sitting, completely absorbed by the heartbreaking story, the whip-smart writing, and the funny, fearless author.”
“Over four heartrending, transformative years, Helen Fremont lives through all the big questions—love, family, art, caretaking, death, self-knowledge—as an impossible situation just keeps getting more impossible. Where there are no answers and no solutions, Fremont offers tenderness, self-deprecating humor, wisdom, and most powerfully, a deep and abiding love that honors not just Maddie, but the power of seeing and being seen by our own beloveds.”
“In Outside the Lines best-selling memoirist Helen Fremont delivers a profound history lesson as she deftly weaves the many ways the past confines our ability to love in the present. What were the risks and rewards of queer life outside of the constraints of youth, heterosexual marriage, and illness. I felt I had entered a new genre of memoir, one filled with sizzling passion and need as queer bodies discover real desire for the first time. Fremont makes us look back at our own histories and gives us all the permission to forgive ourselves for not knowing how to love but doing it anyway.”
“Helen Fremont has written a rich, moving story of coming out: as a lesbian in the conservative 1980s; as a daughter starting to resist parental demands; and as a woman learning the complexities of intimacy and mortality”.
The Escape Artist
Featured Book: The Escape Artist
Selected as a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” new book in 2020.
Recommended as one of the “Best New Books” by People Magazine in 2020
BookPage named it a “Reader’s Choice” book of 2020.
A luminous family memoir from the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller, After Long Silence, lauded as “mesmerizing” (The Washington Post Book World), “extraordinary” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), and “a triumphant work of art” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In the tradition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or George Hodgman’s Bettyville, Fremont writes with wit and candor about growing up in a household held together by a powerful glue: secrets. Her parents, profoundly affected by their memories of the Holocaust, pass on to both Helen and her older sister a penchant for keeping their lives neatly, even obsessively compartmentalized, and a zealous determination to protect themselves from what they see as danger from the outside world.
She delves deeply into the family dynamic that produced such a startling devotion to secret-keeping, beginning with the painful and unexpected discovery that she has been disinherited in her father’s will. In scenes that are frank, moving, and often surprisingly funny, Fremont writes about growing up in such an intemperate household, with parents who pretended to be Catholics but were really Jews—survivors of Nazi-occupied Poland. She shares tales of family therapy sessions, disordered eating, her sister’s frequently unhinged meltdowns, and her own romantic misadventures as she tries to sort out her sexual identity.
In a family devoted to hiding the truth, Fremont learns the truth is the one thing that can set you free. Scorching, witty, and ultimately redemptive, The Escape Artist is a powerful contribution to the memoir shelf.
Watch (under 3 minutes) Author Helen Fremont on being disowned and declared dead by her family.
Hear (2 minute) segment on The Drum Literary Magazine “Safe and Sound” mini-cast, first episode.
Watch a 47 minute YouTube book talk with Helen Epstein hosted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Listen to “On Point” WYPR radio with Lisa Morgan and Marion Winik: Helen Fremont and the Minefield of Family Memoir.
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Books A Million
Simon & Schuster
“…Beautifully written, honest, and psychologically astute. A must read.”
“A riveting exploration of trauma and its aftermath.”
“The Escape Artist does what the best memoirs do by forcing readers out of their own comfy shoes and into those of another human being. By the time Helen Fremont returned me to my own life at book’s end, I found it had been both shaken and expanded by hers. Isn’t this why we read?”
“A wrenching, riveting memoir… With hard-won clarity and compassion, Fremont shows herself to be a teller of complex truths and a literary artist.”
“A humane, honest, eviscerating but entertaining exploration of intimate betrayal, the legacy of secrets, and the high cost of truth-telling… powerful and utterly engrossing.”
“A stunner of a family memoir – a harrowing, sometimes mordantly funny account of the wages of secrecy bred of war and dislocation… a page-turner of uncommon valor.”
“Powerful … a shattering account of growing up in a family that has survived genocide.”
After Long Silence
Featured Book: After Long Silence
Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.
Published by Penguin Random House
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Books A Million
“A story of safe but costly passage from one identity to another that takes us from Europe to America via World War II . . . [Fremont] has the intelligence and imagination to question her own motives. This allows her to question the memoir form, even as she deploys it so beautifully.”
“Mesmerizing . . . Fremont has accomplished something that seems close to impossible. She has made a fresh and worthy contribution to the vast literature of the Holocaust.”
“Fascinating . . . A tragic saga, but at the same time it often reads like a thriller filled with acts of extraordinary courage, descriptions of dangerous journeys and a series of secret identities.”
“Riveting . . . painfully authentic . . . a poignant memoir, a labor of love for the parents she never really knew.”
“Fremont’s memoir is an incredible tale of survival, a beautiful love story and a suspenseful account of how the author’s investigation of her roots shattered fiercely guarded family secrets…”
“…Fremont is an immensely gifted writer who has vividly reconstructed a sensitive and memorable family saga of terror, hiding, and passing, as well as of personal imperatives over two generations around both casting off and confronting the past.
