But she strains when she argues it exists beyond the coasts and in small-town America, and then identifies these places as Newton, Mass.; Bethesda, Md.; Falls Church, Va.; and New Canaan, Conn.
Yet the former chair of the Hertfordshire health authority, and deputy chair of the National Council for One Parent Families, has made a job that, when she took it, existed only as a line in the Lisbon treaty, into the driving force behind a deal that could transform global diplomacy.
Solly, dressed in tracksuit bottoms, was standing on the wet rectangle of lawn in one of those null states she often entered in the presence of the children, when she forgot that she existed, or at least forgot to act as though she did.
I knew not to mention her name and the pressure of not mentioning her made her, in my imagination, beaten thin and flat, attenuated, starved away, a shadow of herself, so I was no longer sure whether she existed when I was not with her.
And not just in terms of polygamy/monogamy — until fairly recently in our history, a woman's legal identity would essentially cease to exist when she married, to be covered by her husband's.
But how can she be sure that the "forever kind of love" exists, when she has yet to find her heaven-sent soul mate?
No such program existed when she was starting out.
On my way to meet her, I wondered whether this persona only existed when she was asking the questions.
She also described returning to school in middle age as challenging: She has had to relearn how to study, and learn from scratch how to navigate the Internet, which didn't exist when she was in high school.
She visited the halls of towns you've barely heard of, in which no party leader has shown an interest for decades, to support local Green parties that barely existed when she first took on the job.
