That’s what more or less has happened to me.’ Has it happened to you? LT: How do you deal with love? Is it a limit, or is it something that’s so explosive it’s not a limit? This thing we feel to be unique when we experience it is so common. Warhol did have love affairs. He did in the last years of his life live with somebody, I believe. I think the kinds of questions you set for yourself around what you’re feeling can stop you from just being able to throw yourself into it. Also, there’s the problem of emotional repetitiveness. PN: There’s a related interest here in breaking with conventional forms of narrative. In one of your later stories, Madame Realism writes in her notebook: ‘Beware of premature closure’ (MR, 147), and this distrust of narratives which are driven by a need for endings is already there in Haunted Houses. LT: Yes, that’s right. PN: And a lot of this depends on how you think about memory. Haunted Houses offers at least two different views: Jane, for example, thinks that ‘there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future’ (H, 100), while Jimmy wonders whether ‘remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts’ (H, 103). LT: I don’t think you have a choice between these two. Memory is in fact very active. A sociologist who read Motion Sickness in manuscript said he was disgusted by it because the narrator was so passive. And I said what do you mean ‘passive’? She thinks all the time. PN: ‘Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything’ (H, 146). In Motion Sickness you describe a fight as ‘much less conclusive’ than a prizefight or a baseball game—‘It’s much more like fiction’ (M, 21). How does this inconclusiveness relate to the narrative desire to connect one thing with another? LT: They’re in bed together. You wouldn’t have that desire to connect one thing with another unless there was all this inconclusiveness. Again, it’s the absence of an ability to make a conclusion that draws you to want to make connections. PN: That recalls Gertrude Stein’s comment about any assemblage of heterogeneous things already containing implicit narrative links. LT: I’m sure she was influenced by the Kuleshov experiment in film, that when you edit, you can put images together and no matter what, the viewer makes connections. Take what Tarantino does with narrative in Pulp Fiction. I began to think of it as a kind of time-line being stretched, and the end, what kind of end is that?