It is the story of a woman trying to reexamine her own values and free herself from social restraints after suffering a lifetime of oppression.
The novel describes her self-therapy; a kind of experiment, allowing her children the freedom she never had in her own strict upbringing, and her ‘interviews’ with their friends.
A forty-year-old woman describes her life living in an apartment in Paris with her three children and their friends.
She contrasts her formerly strict and closed world against the free one of today; obedience to values against wavering anarchy; alacrity and faineance; hard loneliness versus warm fraternity.
Marie Cardinal invites us to question these themes in this personal and passionate book, rich in humour and emotion.