And Notre Dame Is BurningAnd Notre Dame Is Burning

Time has flattened for Esther. Her storybook marriage begins, and ends, in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral. Sifting through the ashes of their years together, a time now collapsed by grief, she finds a mismatched litany: mountain lions, a Paris bookshop, bad dancing, bad faith, marshland, prairieland, miscarriage, motherhood, bagels, Eve. In order to understand this new story, Esther seeks help from generations of women, from a book about evolution, from a friendly philosopher/scientist with a solid grasp of the space-time continuum. Mostly, though, she writes fragments, notes, letters tracing a fine line between a story that soothes and one that suffocates; confronting the impossibility of communicating anything in the right way, at the right moment, to her daughter. Esther writes, and rewrites, until time slowly takes shape again.