Deborah Treisman

We never hear about who the father of the second daughter was.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And we never, I mean, I suppose Brody's the one we get to know most, but we don't really get to know him.

All we know of him are the words that come out of his mouth and his actions, you know.

Yeah.

And there's that moment when she finds out that he's died.

And she says, how could it be that even if I'd never planned to see him again, our story was a different story now?

And it's not the first time that she brings up stories.

When she comes back from Arizona for a while, she's a walking ghost and she's sort of silent.

But then

After a while, I had stories for those who asked, and that becomes, in a sense, like her dancing on the fire escape.

It's her means of entertaining others and also feeling somehow superior.

You know, she's seen things that they haven't.

So she's very aware of her lived experiences as stories in an interesting way.

Yeah, and then, you know, at the end we go back to the opening.

We go back to the foxy little dance moves on the fire escape and to that, to the kind of terror of the emergency room and that first moment where she becomes aware of the body as the housing for both life and death, right?

The center of life and the center of death.

And I suppose that kind of captures the dialectic of the story.

Yeah.