Veronika, a 24-year-old Slovenian woman, is the protagonist of the novel. She lives in Slovenia’s capital city, Ljubljana. Veronika leads a perfectly unremarkable middle-class life: Her parents doted on her as a child and spared no expense in culturing, cultivating, and educating her. She has a degree and a perfectly respectable job as a librarian, and is popular, pretty, and well-liked. Veronika is successful by all conventional metrics. She decides to attempt to die by suicide because this perfect life feels hollow and without meaning. Veronika suppressed her true desires to be “successful,” and gave up her dreams of becoming a pianist to conform to the expectations of her parents and society. Veronika is often angry at herself and the world around her for making her life so hollow.

Veronika begins her time in Villete in despair and ends with a voracious appetite for life. Veronika cannot find joy because she has given up her true self for a highly successful, yet inauthentic, life. Veronika’s looming doom and the other inmates of Villete help her understand how normalcy functions, its pressure to conform, and how one can live despite these pressures. Villete teaches Veronika that she should embrace being seen as “crazy” because it is the only way for her to be happy in the outside world.