The book takes place over roughly one year in Paris and is narrated by a woman who closely resembles Deborah Levy herself. She has come to Paris to live alone, to write, and to work on an essay about Gertrude Stein. She rents a small studio apartment near the Seine and Notre-Dame and begins her stay in November. From the opening pages, the narrator is not settled. She is physically vulnerable after a bicycle accident that left her limping, emotionally uncertain about where she belongs, and intellectually consumed by Gertrude Stein, whose life and work she is trying to understand.
The book begins when the narrator’s new friend Eva calls her in distress to say she has “lost it.” At first this sounds abstract, but it quickly becomes concrete: Eva’s cat has gone missing. Eva is an artist from Copenhagen who is living in Paris temporarily while working on a graphic novel. Her husband, Hamish, lives in Seattle and works as a carpenter on film sets. They have not lived together for a year, and their communication has narrowed mostly to weekly FaceTime calls focused on the cat. The cat’s disappearance becomes the first major event of the book and sets the emotional tone. Eva, the narrator, and their mutual friend Fanny search for the cat, knock on neighbors’ doors, walk the streets calling its name, and speculate endlessly about what might have happened.
Fanny is the third major figure in the narrator’s Paris life. She is French, works in finance, and lives at high speed. She is having multiple affairs at once and speaks openly and bluntly about sex, money, and power. She insists on practical matters, such as reminding the narrator to ride her bicycle on the correct side of the road and buy a helmet. Fanny is both supportive and abrasive, grounding the narrator in reality while also mocking her obsessions.
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