"My last book was just a clumsy, incomplete attempt to get closer to something ungraspable. A way of telling the story through a distorting lens, a prism of pain and regrets and denial. And love. You know all that anyway. As soon as you elide, or prolong, or tighten up, or fill the gaps, you're writing fiction. You're right, I was looking for the truth. I brought together sources, viewpoints, versions. But any writing about the self is a novel. The story is an illusion. It doesn't exist. No book should be authorised to have that printed on its cover."
After the publication of an autobiographical book, a writer falls into a slump seemingly overwhelmed by its success. She meets L about whom there are plenty of questions — Who is she? A person? A figment of the writer's imagination? A play on 'elle', any/every woman? All unanswered. The relationship the writer & L develop, presented as toxic for the writer though reassuring to her for a time, interrogates friendship, writing, literature. The spell is ultimately broken when the writer, whom L has been pushing to write something 'real', settles on writing about L herself. L's response is to attempt to poison the writer.