The thesis I produced under her tutelage was titled The Performance of Intimacy. I didn’t mean the word performance in opposition to “the real”; I’ve never been interested in any sort of con. Of course there exist people who perform intimacy in ways that are fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy, but that’s not the kind of performance that I meant, or the kind I mean. I mean writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.
