The film is the free form stream of consciousness narrative of Susan Sontag's first encounter with her then literary idol Thomas Mann as a precocious high school student living in 1947 LA, and it is based on Sontag's 1987 New Yorker magazine essay 'Pilgrimage.' Though the story is sequential in nature, the non linear visuals mix chronological time to evoke the layered, disjointed, and elusive nature of memory filtered through experience and identification.