The many narratives in Cusk's Outline

Another intriguing and somewhat puzzling scene in Rachel Cusk's Outline (2014) concerns the writing seminar the narrator (Cusk herself on some level) leads in Athens, the raison d'etre for her journey and therefore for this entire narrative. It's a class of (I think) 10 students, all aspiring writers, of varying ages and levels of experience. She begins the class, the first meeting, by asking each of the students to describe or recount something that they observed on the way to the class that morning. That leads to several strong presentations (my thought was that this was a fabulous class or writers - of course the fiction is fictive, and no class of varying abilities could come up w/ such astute observations), including one narrative in which a woman hears a strand of a Back keyboard piece from a window as she passes by a music conservatory, making her think of her failed attempt at a career in music. We can see that each of these observations could lead to a really fine story, or even a novel - all of which makes this seem to me that Cusk has presented a fine exercise for a writing seminar. Strangely, one of the students - the youngest, and the one whom she'd been warned would take over the class if allowed to - says he doesn't make such observations as they have nothing to do with his writing. At the end of the class, the final student, who'd remained silent up to that point, denounces Cusk as a terrible teacher. During the class Cusk received a frantic call from her young son, back home in England, who'd become lost on his way to school - over the phone she navigates him back to safety. So what have we here: Cusk (or the narrator, if you prefer) leads a terrific seminar but gets blasted, unjustly, by a student w/ bad attitude, and is made to feel guilt for leaving her children home possibly w/out sufficient supervision. So we see the forces pulling her apart: commitment to family, commitment to career, need for self-esteem, peculiar facility for evoking in others the desire or even need to tell their stories. This theme continues in the next chapter, w/ a twist, as the (unnamed, I think) guy she met on the plane (curiously, throughout she refers to him as her "neighbor") invites her for the 2nd day in a row to go out w/ him on is boat; she obliges, and can we be surprised that after these long conversations and her willingness to go for a ride w/ him, the "neighbor" makes a pass at her - which she brusquely rejects: he's unattractive to her, and she is no doubt put off by his serial failures at marriage. So why does she want to spend so much time w/ him?