The novel can be thought of as a coming-of-age story where the protagonist defines the meaning of her life and her own philosophy of living as well as accepts herself for the way she is, painfully, but inevitably, unapologetically, and flamboyantly, in the midst of trying to move on from the first relationship of her life. The novel takes the format of a very long conversation with a friend. In the sometimes ostensibly real, sometimes ostensively imagined conversation, the protagonist talks about many things, such as love, neurodiversity, maturity and acceptance, her plans for the future, and writing itself — instead of deciding what to write by searching within what has happened in the past, she decides how she wants to live, what she is going to do at approximately what stage of life and writes about it when she gets there and experiences the foretold event. Hence, how writing interacts with the future is like an experiment of reverse engineering or the construction of a piece of performance art. But the past is still important, as it has shaped her and made her the person she is right now. So she tells her friend about her past, not how it actually happened, but in the reading of stories that she writes where magic and imagination are allowed. For example, in the conversation, the protagonist reads a novella about walking where the main character often times stumbles into figures coming out of dreamlands, and a short story about earthworms and a magic fruit. After each reading, the protagonist dissects the symbolism of the read story together with her friend with complete candor and hears his critique. 

The past is portrayed in a fantastical and fabled way through lots of stories written by the protagonist, whereas the future predetermined as if certain, and the present in an abstract, poetic, almost stage-like space where the conversation occurs — the past, the present, the future, unravel all at the same time. Meanwhile, yesterday's future has become today's past and there is a constant shift of perspective during the extended period where the novel is contemplated and constructed — the timeline of the act of writing is usually subdued when a piece of work is completed and presented, but here, the timeline of writing is made explicit and brought to the front stage in the presentation of the novel, as the past, the present, and the future keep getting tangled up with their boundaries residing in both the written world and reality more and more blended. The intention behind such an approach is to demonstrate the fact that to the protagonist, writing is her way of connecting the dots, the needle and thread in the sewing of all the pieces of her life together to make a giant quilt, in addition to the attempt at capturing the fluid and ever-changing nature of the psyche. Here is a quote from the protagonist: I'm a painter, so I write as if I'm painting. And you know, painters do underpainting. This is just the first layer, a sketch, a vision, a promise of what's coming in ultra-diluted burnt sienna. This painting will take up my whole life to complete, it is my life. The novel belongs to the manuscript.

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