After escaping the Charlie Hebdo attack by arriving late, the cartoonist experiences memory loss that her psychiatrist frames as the brain's protective amnesia, shielding her from the full weight of what she narrowly avoided. The gap in memory becomes both a symptom of trauma and a defense mechanism that allows gradual recovery.
The book argues that deliberate immersion in beauty (art, landscape, literature, the sea) is not mere distraction but a working method of reconstruction after trauma. Seeking out the sublime becomes a therapeutic practice that slowly restores the capacity to feel and create.
Overwhelming exposure to great art can produce physical and emotional collapse, but the cartoonist repurposes this vulnerability to beauty as a path back to aliveness rather than a pathology. Being undone by a masterpiece becomes evidence that feeling is returning.
Depicting one's own fractured, post-traumatic experience in comics form turns the artist's lost identity into an object she can observe and reassemble on the page. The act of representing the broken self in the medium that defined her becomes the mechanism for recovering that self.