Cusk's Outline: The inverse of most first-person narrations

Toward the end of her novel Outline, Rachel Cusk gives us a glimpse of what the title signfies. The narrator (we learn, I think, in the last chapter that her name is Faye, though it's hard not to think of her as the author herself) crosses paths w/ the woman who will take over the Athens apartment that she's been housed in for the week of the writing seminar. The woman coming in, a playwright, is odd and deeply troubled, in fact traumatized, as the victim of a recent mugging and attack. The woman speaks almost non-stop, telling the story of her life and her eccentricities (eating disorders, among other problems), and at one point she remarks that as she hears others talk of their struggles, their marriages, the creativity, she feels as if all these lives are filled in around her and whereas her own life story is empty - the stories she hears constitute an outline of her life, but her life is not "filled in" so to speak. This ties in w/ what I'd noted in an earlier post, that is, the opacity of the narrator - she hears many life stories, in fact somehow she seems to inspire the confessional instinct in everyone she meets (many of them writers or aspiring writers), but we know little about her - the inverse of most first-person narrations. She never "confides" in her readers; what she tells us about her life is only told through her recollection of her interactions with others. In a broader sense, what Cusk is getting at I think is that our lives are made up not only by the story we would tell of our life - what one might say, for example, to a therapist - but also by the stories of all the lives of people we know, and people we meet. In fact, Cusk might go so far as to say that it's the stories of others that constitute the lived experience of our lives. Sartre said "hell is other people," but Cusk reverses that: life is other people (literature, too, for that matter). Without the narratives of others we would have no sense of how to narrate our own experiences; life consists of shared narrations.