The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.
In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called ClΓ©mentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isnβt sure heβs ready for fatherhoodβ¦Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Γric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people weβve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people whoβve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.