~Without admitting it, Anne-Marie has been dreading this date for months. Today, her youngest son, Théo, is leaving the family nest. From the family’s last breakfast as three around the kitchen table to the moment when the son’s silhouette disappears from the moving van’s rear-view window, she will have to face facts: nothing will ever be as it was before. Throughout this particular day, Anne-Marie, in turns unsteady and confused, awkward and touching, revisits the decisive moments in her life, a large part of which has been devoted to motherhood, between forgetting herself and the intense joy of being the familial center of gravity. With her last child now flying off on his own, how can she relearn to live alongside Patrick, her husband of few words, and find new meaning for her life to come? What new signposts can she cling onto?

In this sensitive and nuanced novel, Philippe Besson succeeds at raising an ordinary event—a grown child leaving the home—to the level of a sublime, poignant moment. With his signature elegant style, full of precision and detail, he scrutinizes the contradictory emotions, psychological flaws, and secret thoughts of a simple, fragile woman devastated by reality. Readers will find it impossible not to see themselves in this mother’s vertigo and fear in the face of the unknown horizon stretching out before her.