Performance artist, outspoken transgender anarchist with no place to call home, macho woman, fashion model for Marianne Alvoni, target of the Swiss tabloids: Éve-Claudine Lorétan—also known as Coco, Dana and Patricia—was too many people in a life that was too short.
 
Olivier Fatton met Coco on a Sunday in November 1989. The photographer was immediately captivated by “this radiant yet sad angel”. Over coffee in a gay bar in Bern, they made a pact: Coco would pose for him, and Fatton would document her gender reassignment surgery. Their working relationship soon became a love affair, during which Fatton continued assembling his multifaceted photographic essay about the colourful Coco: a mosaic of intimate portraits and staged fashion photographs, at home and in clubs, on the road and in the Alps. The pictures are haunted by those large, melancholy eyes, which Coco once said had become her second mouth. Her thousand-page autobiography was stolen by burglars, leaving those eyes to tell the sorrows of a twentieth-century Dame aux Camélias.
 
Dunia Miralles sees Coco as a literary figure from the demi-monde. In her biographically based novel accompanying Olivier Fatton's photographs, Miralles recounts the sorrows of the young Coco.