It's a vulnerable period yet people often don't understand how vulnerable they were until a long time afterwards, which is sort-of captivating. The moment when a person stops being reactive and begins to really make the decisions that will shape who they'll become.

Regarding the transition to female adulthood, it's the great moment of change. Then you're back into the realm of character and that's everything for me. Where it gets interesting is exploring the who and why of what's going on. Sex itself is, with a few variations, a pretty standard activity: something goes in somewhere until at least one person is happy, so what can be understood from any description of the physical is pretty limited. They are inextricable and complete each other.įor me specificity is the most important thing to cling to when writing about sex. The dialogue and exposition were all written at the same time though. For me it was also a game of welding a modernist internal monologue together with the 19th century external monologue and seeing how they influence each other. Our understanding of him is totally reliant on what he says, how he says it and the way he behaves. Their knowledge of him and his internal workings are the same as how we all experience other people in life. They see what she sees and hear what she hears. With the older actor, the reader only experiences him through her eyes. They know everything about her and there are no boundaries between the reader and the character. They are embedded in the voice and experience of the young girl. What was clear from early on though was that the reader was going to experience the two voices in different ways. It took a long time to understand what I was writing about and who I was writing about.

The lesser bohemians