The Flower of My Secret
[2][3] Leocadia "Leo" Macías, missing her husband, Paco, a NATO military official who is in Brussels for reasons related to the Bosnian War, puts on a pair of boots he gave her, but they are too tight, and she cannot get them off.Ángel and Leo get along well, but when he asks her to review a new anthology of works by Amanda Gris, a popular writer of romance novels, she refuses and leaves his office.Antonio stops by and tells her that he had taken advantage of her recent forgetfulness to steal some of her belongings to finance his show, among them a copy of her rejected novel, which is being made into a film.Leo, who had been worried she was losing her mind, like several of her female relatives before her, muses about the paradoxes of life and surprises Antonio by thanking him for giving meaning to her darkest months.The website's critics consensus reads, "The Flower of My Secret finds Almodóvar revisiting old themes in a new, more subdued key, yielding a slight but vivacious work that delivers the pleasure of a punchy novella.In The Flower of My Secret, Leo tells Ángel that she earned money reading and writing letters for her illiterate neighbors as a child, a detail from Almodóvar's own life that also appears in Pain and Glory (2019).