Helen Fremont is an award-winning author and essayist. She wrote the critically-acclaimed, national best-selling book, After Long Silence. Her second memoir, The Escape Artist, was selected as an “Editor’s Choice” new book by The New York Times in 2020. Her latest book, Outside the Lines has just been released October 3, 2025.
Featured Book: Outside the Lines
New Release!
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.
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Advanced Praise for Outside the Lines
“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
Selected by People Magazine as a “Best New Book“ in 2020.
New York Times listed as “Editor’s Choice“ in 2020.
Winner of the Audiophile Earphone Award.
Selected by BookPage as a “Reader’s Choice” best 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.
Selected by BookPage as one of the “Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2020” (starred review)
Read the New York Times Book Review.
Read the Washington Post Book Review.
Winner of Audiofile Earphones Award.
After Long Silence
“To this day, I don’t even know what my mother’s real name is.” Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn’t until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish – Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth.
News and Events
East End Books, Provincetown, MA
Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. - Provincetown, MA
Helen will be at Provincetown's East End Bookstore to talk about her new book, "Outside the Lines."
Join Helen at P-town’s East End Books at 5:00 pm for a talk about her new memoir, Outside the Lines. Home-baked goodies included!
Boston Book Festival Oct. 25, 2025. 10:00 am – early afternoon
Sat., Oct. 25, 2025 10:00am through early afternoon at Sibylline Press Booth
Come to the Boston Book Festival on Saturday, October 25 - Helen will be at the Sibylline Press Booth (#40) in Copley Square from 10 am through early afternoon.
Come to the Boston Book Festival on Saturday, October 25, and stop by the Sibylline Press Booth # 40 in Copley Square. Helen will be available to chat, sign books, and offer baked goodies. Stop by! (The booth is at the end of a row of booths close to the Trinity Church – on the righthand side as you face the church.
November 6, 2025 PRINT Bookstore, Portland, Maine – 7:00 pm
Thurs, Nov. 6, 2025 - 7:00 pm - Debra Spark & Helen at PRINT Bookstore, Portland ME
Join Helen and Debra Spark at PRINT bookstore in Portland, Maine, for a book talk and discussion of "Outside the Lines."
Join Helen Fremont and Debra Spark at PRINT Book store as they discuss Helen’s new memoir “Outside the Lines,” and other cool book stuff. And munch on home-baked goodies!
