How does a woman create books, drawings, sculptures? How does she give birth, suffer, and cohabit with the man-creator? Nancy Huston builds up her book in the form of an investigation of famous writers' and artists' marriages. The reader dives in the lifes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Héloïse and Abélard, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer.