A ten-year-old boy is orphaned in the unedifying America of the 1920s and is placed under the control of an eccentric lady, obsessed with being à la page, vital, capricious, seductive and adorable. Together with her, he will spend the next thirty years in an incessant spiral of parties, love affairs, adventures and various strokes of fortune. The astonished reader, suspended between the fascination of noticing many of the laughable tics of his own time and the explosive laughter of someone who is dragged into a vertiginous whirlwind. And all this by the work and grace of one of the most unforgettable aunts ever conceived by a modern writer, whose perfume we feel floating in the air, with tears still present in our eyes, long after having closed the book.