Selfhood is depicted not as a stable continuous 'I' but as a shifting set of voices, names and bodily states that resist being assembled into one coherent person. The text enacts this by refusing linear chronology and consistent narrative perspective, so form mirrors the dispersal of the self.
Desire and physical harm are presented as inseparable channels of the same bodily intensity rather than opposites, so erotic experience carries aggression and injury carries charge. Viewed this way, the body becomes a site where pleasure and wounding cannot be cleanly separated.
The novel asserts that remembering is an active, distorting act of composition in which the rememberer invents and reorders events rather than recovering a fixed record. Because memory is unreliable in this way, the account of one's own life is itself a kind of fiction.
The book follows a single woman whose identity fractures as she moves through episodes of sex, pain and recollection, her sense of who she is coming apart rather than resolving. Her trajectory does not arrive at recovered wholeness; the disintegration is the arc itself.