Three people at the Franprix supermarket on Rue du Rendez-vous in Paris: a woman, who’s watching; Gordana, a cashier; and a still-young man who stubbornly insists on going to cash register 4, Gordana’s, every Friday morning. The woman who’s watching, Jeanne Santoire, is the narrator. Everything exists through her. She supposes and dreams up a life, several lives, in the present, future and past, for both Gordana and the young man. She also digs galleries through her own life, which she revisits and recomposes. By the end, we have learned that her parents were provincial shopkeepers and her grandmother was blind, that she had been an accountant and loved a man, and that one day, the man left.

Nos vies, the latest work by Marie-Hélène Lafon, describes urban solitude. This text spun off from a short story, Gordana, published in 2012.