The reader follows Zouzou from the late 1990s to the present, through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and motherhood. She reflects an entire generation profoundly affected by the arrival of the new millennium. Each episode of Zouzou's personal life corresponds to an event in our collective mind--the 1998 World Cup, September 11, 2001, the second round of the 2002 presidential election, the influenza A outbreak. However quickly the world may change, one thing stays the same: the friendship between Zouzou and Carmen, with all of its trials and tribulations. It all begins by chance in the middle of a heat wave in August 2003, in Paris ...