Her story begins in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, near the Rhine Falls. Little Mirelle (not yet known as HDB) emits her first cry on November 10 during an astonishing year for the moon. Our heroine doesn’t stay long in the region of her birth, whose inhabitants speak a language more like gobbledygook than German. She lands in a small town in French-speaking Switzerland. As she sits, completely bored, on school benches, she imagines fabulous lives, full of stars, travel and incredible stories. She composes her first Oscar and Pulitzer Prize acceptance speeches! Because she thinks big, and her native country has become too small for her oversized dreams, she leaves for Paris to join Cours Florent (a drama school). After a few enriching theater experiences and some wonderful encounters, she travels even further, to a vast country she has fantasized about from reading Paul Auster and Truman Capote: New York, Chicago, Atlanta, the Grand Canyon, San Francisco and so much more. She spends two magical years in a country that still symbolizes the American dream. A Jill-of-all-trades, she becomes, among other things, a grape harvester, an electronic contact controller for NASA, an au pair, a French teacher for mafia lawyers, a translator of pharmaceutical instructions, a French voice for the David Schwimmer (yes, Ross in Friends!) theater company, an extra, a switchboard operator, a cat sitter, a green plant and then in charge of communications and a pain-reliever in contemporary art galleries. After twenty years traveling between Paris, Switzerland and many other places, she feels the need to be near her parents and settles peacefully in Nîmes, France. Our heroine now calls herself Mirelle HDB. A happy novelist, editor and graphic designer of three novels, two collections of short stories, and Chroniques confites, a journal written during the Covid-19 lockdown, she now spends her time writing down her advent