Dreaming in French

Even as a child, Lena was prone to knowing things others did not. Or rather, she knew things others would know later, but she knew them before they happened. Events would unfold in her mind with the clarity of a movie on a screen—even as she tried to hold the images away. When she was young, a murder, a lie, an accident—but as she got older she gained access to more private moments: the morbid thoughts of a friend, her husband’s treachery, her lover masturbating to a picture of her six thousand miles away. Lena believes her father abandoned her at birth—a story told by her American mother to save her acting career. But as a young child Lena roamed the blue hills of their small French village hand in hand with a father who adored her and with whom she lived alone. Thirty years later, all memories of her father have vanished. When a haunting extra-marital love affair triggers her recollection of her French childhood, Lena discovers the images that flit through her mind are more than dreams or figments of imagination. She is repeating the circumstances of her father’s life. Can she untie the complex secrets of her past? Or will her father’s mistakes result in her too coming undone?