During the 2003 heat wave, an old North African man in a Parisian suburb decides to end it all and slits his wrists, dispassionately, in a slow, peaceful ceremony.  A young man leaves prison, welcomed out only by his sister, who has found their father’s trail.  A petty crook tells a woman the story of his life so that she can turn it into a book. But he’s in no hurry to pay for the writing job. So she decides to tear up the manuscript right in front of him. Furious, the crook rapes her with the scraps of paper, shoving them into her mouth and genitals. Picking up the pieces, she reads fragments of a life; she goes back to it, and it becomes a book, her book. This book.  And in this disorderly book, as if stolen from someone else, we find her life, in pieces too -- instants, moments, a man who leaves you, childhood memories, in France, in Algeria, visiting her father, a stranger in the Luxembourg Gardens. The jigsaw puzzle of a woman’s life, it tells a story of solitude, male domination, the hardship of daily life in a time of crisis, the question of identity and searching for the father. Plus a dildo received as a gift from a woman friend, canine encounters in the street, the burlesque comedy of appointments at the Employment Office… The writing is musical here, and what you can hear through these fragments is indeed its music: precise, often ironic, droll, and always dense.