A beautiful but disturbed young woman lives alone at a beach cottage, reliving her past, a life of delusions and lies.

Lou Andreas Sand is a former fashion model whose life has gone into a downward spiral, including drug use and a nervous breakdown.

Along the way, she became engaged to marry Mark, an ad executive, but apparently jilted him on the day of their wedding, leading to her descent into drugs and an attempted suicide.

[1] Schatzberg initially worked with French screenwriter Jacques Sigurd, who had written a script involving a woman having an abortion, but the collaboration came to an end due to creative differences.

[1] The movie was adapted as a two-character play by Elisabeth Bouchaud (in French) and put on at La Reine Blanche (Paris) in 2017.