Deborah Treisman

And that feels violating.

It's friction with a burn to it.

It's a bad dream, she calls it.

A flush of horror came and went.

But I was used to it, she says.

So if you isolate the moments of actual sex...

And her saying after that scene, why was she so afraid of making Brody angry?

You know, she didn't stop him because she was afraid.

You can look at it with today's eyes.

You can look at it even with eyes from then and see she's perhaps using the language of what she wants these experiences to be rather than the language of what they actually were.

Yeah.

In a way, it made me think a bit about Lolita because we're getting it from the opposite end, you know, where Humbert Humbert uses all kinds of flowery language to cast a positive light on what he's doing.

And here Kara is on the other end of it and using that language to cast a positive light.

But maybe also, you know, I think what the language that Joan Silber used when talking about the story in a Q&A was she's pledged to being sturdy, to being equal to what happens.

So Kara, in her own mind, is framing these moments as part of her quest for peace.

experiences, part of her quest to own her own sexuality, and somehow maybe avoiding being damaged by these things in that way.

Yeah, she's kind of irrepressible.

she is in some way she is and what's interesting also is that you know Brody abandons her and steals from her and does everything bad he can do um

But it seems as though in Kara's life, men become somewhat disposable.

You know, she doesn't bother telling her ex that she had his child.