Sarrasine

Her notebook began with pages and pages of doodles. I flipped quickly through it, having neither the skill nor interest to pursue some kind of psychoanalytical analysis. At some point, as I was flipping, I found myself looking at pages full of cursive. I flipped back. Back and forth I went, trying to figure out at what point the doodles became words. I could not locate it. The more I peered at each page, the further I worked back toward the front of the notebook until finally, there didn't seem to be any doodling at all.

enisarraS

Reading her notebook, I found her obsessed with the strange French story of Sarrasine, an artist obsessed with a woman who turns out to be a castrato. This discovery, that the perfectly formed woman who he has based his most beautiful artwork on, is actually a man, drives the artist mad. He kills himself. Sarrasine was a boy's name, though I thought it would work just  as well for a girl. She had shortened it to mimic Sarah. Did she just like the name? She must have changed hers? Had something happened? In any case, either she was lying about it or hiding it.