This is a novella in three parts, a reflection on the impact of romantic love and sex on a woman’s sense of freedom and destiny.
In the first part, our heroine is a teenager awakening to love and sexual feelings. She is spending the summer on a small island in the South of France, among the pines and the wisterias, and still half way in childhood. An older woman, an actress friend of her mother comes to stay at the house for a week. What follows will bring relief from her deep loneliness, and guide her through her first steps into adulthood.
In the second part, she is middle aged, lesbian-identified, and struggling with insecurities set off by a recent break up. In Paris for a visit, she meets a stranger in a café and tries to rebuild a positive sense of adventure around their relationship. Full of hesitation and resentment, she will have to learn again how to trust and how to love, surrounded by the oppressive memories and rediscovered beauty of the city of her birth.
Finally, we find her a mature woman, going from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a journey of redemption and forgiveness. While staying for one night with friends in an elegant house in Venice Beach, she develops a crush on her host’s daughter, a young woman 30 years her junior. In their brief encounter, she will revisit her past travels through love, with the accompanying joy and pain. In the end, she will find herself one step closer to understanding why no matter how brief, true love is always worth the trouble it brings along.
