What is the importance of creativity in the novel, The Woman Upstairs?

The Woman Upstairs is a novel about art and its origins in personal relationships. As Nora gets to know Sirena and Skandar and their son, she is called to herself, called to create things that she has experience working on, but has not worked on for a long time. She is effectively called to a confrontation with herself and her own desires. While this begins in love and good sensations, it concludes in experience, the constitutive events that makes a person’s personality and identity real and solid in the world. Nora starts out making a miniature version of her heart, and learns to make art that will carry her anger and humiliation into the actual world. The novel itself does not seem to be the thing she creates, so much as it is the story of her love and humiliation, told in her own voice. The author does not assert herself, and the ‘after’ Nora does not assert herself in her ‘before’ experiences. Nora’s creativity remains outside the novel. However, because of her experience with the foreign family, she can have now have a relationship with her own creative fire.