Whether it's a makeup-free Beyoncé on the cover of Vogue, a concert-tour behind-the-scenes documentary or one's own reality show, intimacy is elusive.
Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time.
True intimacy is as dynamic, and sometimes elusive as our own self.
The novel is narrated entirely in the second person, a stylistic choice that produces moments of intense intimacy but also means that Vera remains as elusive for the reader as she ultimately is for Sonny.
This is quickly manifest, even in the earliest narratives of childhood and youth, set in Updike's native small-town Pennsylvania, with its poignant intimacies of Depression-era families whose autobiographical phases, like elusive moons, are only partly veiled.
Schulz tells us early on that her goal is "to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility" and to "linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong".
Yet the intimacy remained.
Intimacy is our currency.
