In an interview on Adultery

Your next book, Simple Passion is by a woman.

And the sensibility is totally different. Nothing is in the present. It’s all about waiting. There’s a lover, who’s never named, or rather only as ‘A’: a cipher. And the protagonist is waiting for him to phone, waiting for him to come up the stairs. You hear almost nothing about the sexual act. The pleasure is instantly pain, because it’s about loss. And this is what adultery is about, particularly for women. It always ends in loss, in devastation. And there’s always the anticipation of the loss. So there’s no real sense of pleasure. The woman in Simple Passion spends her entire life consumed by waiting for her lover; sitting by the phone, waiting for him to say “I’ll be there in five minutes”. And then as soon as he comes there’s an inevitable end, not only to the affair but to that particular assignation. He’s going to go back to his wife, to his job, to another country.

A tale of feminine passivity?

Yes, the woman is all anticipation. There is no engagement, no conversation. Loneliness has to be one of the major themes. You see that the characters can never transcend that loneliness. It’s engulfing. That brief moment of whatever their sexual passion is gives way to a loneliness that’s all-consuming.

And it’s obviously very lyrical.

That’s what I’m interested in, it’s the lyric quality in all this.