I had also speculated on the divided self, whether it was possible to live out each different part of the self simultaneously. As in all divided selves, Sabina lives in relationships which are partly imagined. Both the unreality of them and of her whole life, besides a feeling of dispersion and fragmentation, made her wish for someone who could follow the erratic course of her acts, synthesize her, even if it meant doing so within the context of guilt and judgment. As in all neurosis, the vision of others is partial, and to express this I took inspiration from the film La Ronde in which there was a carrousel, a merry-go-round feeling. The men moved around Sabina, were highlighted during the encounter, and vanished (as would happen in life). This was completely misunderstood by the critics. They felt personally insulted that the men were not done as fully as the woman, not realizing that I had meant to take the reader inside of the mind and feelings of Sabina, with the limitations imposed by her own vision, obsessions, and fantasies, so that the reader would know how a Sabina felt.

The eye of the detective, the “lie detector,” was not only a projection of Sabina’s inner guilt, but also the eye of the world upon her acts, from which the guilt stems. She did not look upon herself with her own vision, but through the eyes of others, and this was also the secret of her disintegration. I do not believe such disintegration need always lead to madness. It can cause a shock of awareness, lead to a new vision into one’s behavior.

Sabina’s difficulties develop when she begins to act out her wishes, fantasies, and dreams. Sabina is a close study of the divided self seeking to maintain its own world in a vacuum. Testing it in relation to others is disastrous. She is faced with her impotence to love, but is clarified by Djuna, by confronting her fantasies.

In A Spy in the House of Love I showed only the aspects of the relationship which Sabina could see, no more. The men who played a role in her life were not treated as rounded characters, independently of her, because they did not exist in that total way for Sabina. Passion, I meant to say, and illusion, are an intense but narrow lens. At no time is Sabina’s husband Alan described otherwise than as Sabina sees him. There is no other way to make one experience Sabina from within, know her. In the poetic subjective novel you are inside the consciousness of the character, and you are Sabina.

A Spy in the House of Love finally achieved what I have been struggling to achieve, the level of depth analysis, the subterranean richness, but linked to a narrative, and the design of this narrative I have been faithful to, so that it has both a surface and a labyrinth, and anyone can get hold of it.