Marcel Proust—France’s famed 20th-century writer—offers a through-line of allusions for Nao’s diary entries. The teenage storyteller fills her thoughts in a doctored copy of Proust's memoir-novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, explaining the trick in some of her earliest entries in Part 1:

And after that, every time I took out the book, I’d stare at the title and start to wonder. I mean, Marcel Proust must be pretty important if even someone like me had heard of him, even if I didn’t know who he was at first and thought he was a celebrity chef or a French fashion designer.

“You can’t tell a book by its cover!” Nao playfully jests. But she also unloosens deeper significance by unwittingly summoning the Modernist author. Proust makes for more than just aesthetically deceptive diary covers. Best known for À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, the author traced the past through his writings and pioneered Modernist narrative techniques in doing so. Proust’s seven-volume work recounts, with meticulous, evocative detail, his childhood upbringing, sexual awakening, and relationship to art. It is a mix of wistfulness and madeleines that makes retrospection the driving force of its plot. Writing decades after the events themselves, Proust creates his story only with the help of hindsight. This is much the same way Nao herself approaches her own diary entries. Recognizing the impossibility of ever capturing the immediate present, Nao creates her narrative by processing her past. She gives meaning to her life in the act of retracing it—outdoing the French writer, in a way, by writing her story over his.