In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani's Les Années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life that way too.