Clarissa’s character is closely based on the title character of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like the character in Woolf’s book, she has a wondrous outlook toward the world around her. Though she takes great pleasure in the day-to-day details of life, she questions the choices that she has made and has doubts about what her life has come to. She has strong feelings of nostalgia for her love affair with Richard and the sense of unchecked possibility that she had in her youth. Clarissa compares this period of wild, unabashed freedom to the domesticity of her present life. She loves the small domestic details of her life, and she enjoys the simple acts of buying flowers and keeping a beautiful apartment. At the same time, she wonders if all of it is enough and has doubts about whether she feels fulfilled by her life and her relationship with Sally. Even though she questions some of her choices, at the end of the day she takes comfort in the idea that the life has meaning because of those hours that are filled with supreme, wonderful pleasure.