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”.
