A wild head of blonde hair and a slim figure, an eccentric style, an unmistakably foreign name. Just over thirty, this is the protagonist of the story who walks around one of the “most incredible” neighbourhoods of Milan where, together with her enormous and melancholic dog, Bartleby, Bart for short, she’s been living for some time in search of herself and her place in the world. Is she searching for her Great Love? Perhaps. Her wise and detached ex or the fascinating writer who doesn’t yet know her? Or maybe it would be enough to go to bed with someone. But what Hilary really wants is the barcode for her First Book: but to get it, she has to stop thinking so much and start writing that book. In the meantime, when it’s time to make a choice, a bookstore seems to be the only place where she can work without going out of her head. But there are months when her work isn’t enough to defeat what she calls Nouvelle Poverty: her clothes become ‘hostages’ at the drycleaner’s, the bills stay in the mailbox. Luckily there’s her adopted family – Silvia, friend/accomplice; Jacopo, the colleague who corrects her errors in Italian; the Youth, an unreliable lover but, in his own way, devoted; Dries, the sensitive and extravagant florist; her Psychologist who almost doesn’t ask to be paid for their sessions – loves encountered by chance or by choice in a city less and less foreign to her. Dog parks, bike thieves, terrace parties, internet points, convivial happy hours on the sidewalks: daydreams, adventures, sufferings, anxieties and little satisfactions in a variegated and very recognizable Milan. But Hilary’s story is not a novel: it’s fragments of existence, light and desperate tales because that’s how life is, essential and exaggerated. While waiting for her doubts to settle, contradictions to be resolved, the project to be clearly delineated, one can also try to invent a life, pretend to be another and as a game, live in marvellous apartments. Other people’s homes, places and emotions of somewhere else.