Leocadia ("Leo") Macías (Marisa Paredes) writes popular romance novels under a pen name, Amanda Gris. Unlike her romantic ("pink") novels, her love life is troubled. She has a difficult relationship with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a military officer stationed in Brussels and later in Bosnia, who is physically and emotionally distant. The film starts with Leo writing about the feeling of having lost her lover, a feeling that she compares to the pain of a tight pair of boots that she cannot take off. Almodóvar took for this first part of the film strong plot elements from Dorothy Parker's short story, "The Lovely Leave".