The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud in The Book Book

I'm reading a book that's making me happy.

It's The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud.

It's about a woman, a teacher, who falls in love with a family. First the eight year old boy, then his mother, and I'm assuming his father is next.

The family is exotic and beautiful and they will only be in her city for a year. It's a self-limiting love affair.

I've read and enjoyed others Messud books. The Emperor's Children and The Lost Life.

She writes in the voice of cool, careful women who make unlikely choices. Her books have art and family and relationships and history.

The front pages of The Woman Upstairs has a Proust quote from Remembrance of Things Past.

*Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from oneself, the lover. *

That means that the person we love is someone we've created, not the person we think we love.