A novella-half joke and half nightmare-by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" ( The New Yorker). Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author shall write a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, French aspiring artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she's in love with. The second part tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him, he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. "Something strange happened along the way," Vila-Matas himself wrote "Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked , the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.".