They just walk out a door. It’s circular, begins again. It’s a very complicated handling of narrative. Going back to that fight in Motion Sickness, it has an ending in the sense that the two men separate, but who is the winner? You know that they’re in a relationship with each other, but the question of who won or lost will depend on the version of the story you’re going to hear from each of the participants. What does it mean to come to a conclusion? Jouissance, I suppose. Coming to a conclusion. PN: In ‘Madame Realism’, we’re told that ‘stories do not occur outside thought. Stories, in fact, are contained within thought. It’s only a story really should read, it’s a way to think’ (MR, 108). The point seems to be that narratives shouldn’t be locked up in a distinction between true and false, but are actually ways of articulating ourselves. LT: Yes, I was trying to take narrative out of the realm of untrue, irrelevant, not profound…. Some people say ‘I never read a novel, I read theory’, and so on. The same people might argue against a high/low split but say they don’t read novels. You could say the novel’s an old form; with the computer why should people read stories and novels? I wanted to argue that any form you use represents a way of thinking, ideas. Do you read things only because you identify with them or can you disidentify with them too? PN: One of the interesting things about these stories is the connection you seem to pursue between narrative and the familial, the Oedipal. ‘All ideas are married’, says Madame Realism (A, 105), and in the story called ‘Absence Makes the Heart’, the death of the father seems somehow connected with the idea of the Woman as solitary and mystified—‘Her reluctance must be read as a mystery, a deception from one whose own creation was exampled in the stories he loved’ (A, 69). It’s not immediately clear to me whether the loss of the father signals the failure of narrative or freedom from it. LT: What if the loss of the father, her recognition of him as now symbolic, in fact enables her to see herself in the story, a story that men have of her? PN: She becomes the narrator instead of being just the Woman? LT: That’s right. It’s like saying: you’re placing me in the story in certain ways but I have needs, I have desires. I’m the subject of my own story, I’m not just the object in your story. PN: There’s a passage in Motion Sickness where the narrator remembers her father’s voice: ‘It’s my father’s voice at the Leaning Tower, distracting me just the way he does when I eat veal