Love and Intimacy

Throughout the novel, the author uses Mira’s relationships with her father and Annie in order to craft a complex examination of love and intimacy. Although the novel begins with the third person narrator’s metaphysical commentaries on God, creation, spirituality, and art, her narrative shifts from the universal to the specific with her introduction of Mira. “This particular story,” says the narrator in Part One, “concerns a birdlike woman named Mira, who is torn between her love for the mysterious Annie, who seems to Mira a distant fish, and her love for her father, who appears as warm as a bear” (6). Although Annie and Mira’s father are the only two people with whom she is close, her love for each of them becomes increasingly irreconcilable over the course of the novel. The narrator goes on to explain that “To properly love another...