The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

This story begins as a recording of someone speaking. Paul Larimore created a simulacrum of his daughter, Anna, when she was seven years old. He wanted to keep her that close to him: “forever the curious seven-year-old who worshipped her father, and who thought he could do no wrong” (121).

When Anna is 13, she finds her father in bed with four naked simulacra women. Her mother, Erin, has made a deal with Paul to stave off his unfaithfulness, but the incident disgusts Anna. When Anna leaves for college, she stops speaking to her father. She writes books about how the world would be better off without the technology and denies that she’s jealous of her simulacrum. She says, “[t]he desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality” (116).

Paul, with Anna absent, begins playing with Anna’s simulacrum. He leaves her on all the time. When Erin dies, Anna returns home to forgive her father. She asks for a simulacrum of her mother, which she never ends up turning on. Anna’s simulacrum is in her old room. It doesn’t look like her anymore, and she wonders if her father has edited it. She suddenly understands why those naked women haunted her dreams: “It is the way a simulacrum replicates the essence of a subject that makes it so compelling” (120). She leaves the house without talking to her father.

The next section is a letter from Erin, telling Anna that her father misses her. Although he’s not perfect, she says:

‘You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil’ (122).

The story ends with a phrase clearly emitted by a simulacrum, likely of Anna’s mother, asking, “Have you seen my daughter Anna?” (122).