“These notes speak of a film that was to have been made for the cinema. They speak of a biography that a journalist had wanted to write. In the end I cancelled both, as I did so much else.” What remained are these “notes,” published here for the first time, which the Swiss artist set down in 2005 for that documentary film — diaristic jottings “about the passage of time. And about the passage of my time,” as Manon puts it. Given the precision of the phrasing, the term “notes” seems an understatement. Ostensibly conceived as a diary, Feathers turns out to be a many-layered narrative that, in the reading, unfolds into a short, concentrated yet feather-light overview of Manon's life, art, men and everyday existence. In a mixture of shy reticence, decisiveness and at times dry humour, the artist cautiously but self-assuredly attempts to put into words the balancing act between her daily life and the highly stylized self-presentations of her artistic career. In Feathers, memory and the present interweave with the seemingly incidental. Unlike her staged works, it is not the grand emotions that interest the artist but the small fluctuations of mood, poetic observations of nature and the city, the adversities of the heart, reflections on ageing and transience.