Robert Lukens

And then I think it's when she's about 16, she's going by the real river that's down the back of where she lives.

And she becomes possessed by this idea to lie herself down in the grass and she undoes the buttons of her blouse and lies bare chested.

I think it's a romantic vision at night.

In my memory, it's the moonlight coming down on her naked body.

And she doesn't know why she does this.

She just kind of gets enraptured by this idea of the river and this fantasy life.

And she sort of recalls this as this private moment.

And there's an element of sort of childhood sexuality to it too.

It's her sort of opening herself to this idea of sexuality that she has to repress.

So she was just taken up by the kind of romance and lust for this moment.

Yeah, it's wonderful, isn't it?

And it's also this idea that she feels it as this globe that in some ways can kind of spin outside of her control.

And you get that sense when she's back at this house that this isn't a woman coming back to her childhood house and just nostalgically looking out the window at the mango tree and remembering all the fun times she had as a kid.

These are invasive memories and things that she's

put on the dark side of the globe away from the light to shield herself from them or to not deal with them.

Sometimes that globe just spins around and the memories of her husband and her life and all these various kinds of memories spin into the light and she's forced to look at them face to face.

Yeah, well, and that's such an interesting part about that Sydney part of the story.

And obviously there's the portrayal of her horrendous marriage to Colin, but it's such a captivating section of the book because we can feel the excitement of Nora getting

as she gets these glimpses into a life that she senses she could be living with these artists, these bohemians, and it gives life to these artistic impulses that are already present in her.

But it's very nonspecific.