To Stella, the sea was the earth’s deep mind. Her brain relied on the sea to know how to be human.”What Stella Sees” is a book about love, art, and transformation. It focuses on four people, Rachel and Michael, their daughter Stella and her lover Mo. The parents are art critics whose daughter has a series of mysterious, seemingly incurable seizures. Stella is obsessed with the sea, which she studies and reimagines, using shells to create a series of artworks. In a desperate effort to find a cure,
...Rachel moves the disintegrating family from San Francisco to New York to Texas and finally, Paris. There, Stella meets Mo, crippled with cerebral palsy, who is in exile from Romania, runs an art gallery. Each of the characters views Stella’s deep-sea imaginings (what she sees) differently—as empty fantasies or imaginative creations, or communication with something profound—and each view has some truth. But in the story that follows, all the characters are forced to face creatures from their own depths. Stella challenges everyone to ask who is "disabled" and who is "whole"?