In the most surreal moment of the novel, I am still Jane. Perhaps I am like Eco s friend, reading too much into Jane. Similar events happen to different aunts and uncles, and different girls, ages 10-19. Maybe for an author to create fictional characters, she has to render them so realistically they breathe. They must be life-like, too.
Biologists call the duplication of shapes and behaviors in unrelated animals convergent evolution .
Creatures, such as bats and birds, converged because they independently came up with a similar biological solution to the same ecological problem flight. Or maybe Jane and I converge because Mona and I do. Mona also had a family structure similar to mine. Maybe Mona knew at the moment Jane found the perfect room in her father s new house that Jane would lie down on the floor because she , Mona, might have done the same. Maybe the skeleton of my family was a perfect place for Mona to flesh out herself.