“In today’s society, a woman cannot be herself,” wrote Henrik Ibsen in 1878. Things have evolved, but not enough. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, a young actress knows how to change her face and her voice but feels that she neither knows nor can be herself. She wants to be looked at because she feels that she is nothing without the gaze of others, that being an actress is the only way of being a woman within her reach, that the world drives her to empty herself outwards, towards the pleasure and desire of others. When she enters a drama school, she meets a very particular teacher whose classes on theatre history help her to reinterpret her own history and to better understand her identity.

In his third novel, Mariano Peyrou establishes a dialogue between life and its staging and shows how difficult it is to distinguish between them, perhaps because we all live on a stage. What's Inside Is Outside is an introspective and entertaining book, light and moving, simple and subtle, that reveals our own contradictions and confirms its author as one of the most original and brilliant narrators of our time.