Deborah Treisman

Yes.

Her whole life, it seems.

I just want to first think about the ideas that Kara has in the course of the story, because there are four or five spots where she does try to define sexuality in some way.

And it's, I don't think, ever in terms of society.

It's always in terms of nature and God and living on a higher plane.

So for her, in her mind, that time anyway, when she's 16...

It's not a social construct.

It's more a kind of natural force.

Yeah, exactly.

She calls it a guiding star, an exalted idea.

She says they're glowing initiates, you know, as though it's a religious cult.

Sexual feeling existed to impress on humans the sense of a beyond, the reality of another plane.

Yeah, and the joke of it all is that she's experiencing this exalted spiritual pleasure and joy and kind of uplift with someone who is so...

Pedestrian and unworthy of it.

It's almost like a feat of pure imagination for her to invest it with those qualities when Brody's at the other end of it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And she says she never actually loves him.

She just loves his body.

And I don't think we ever get a physical description of him, do we?