"I was working on an article on the encoding of the female body in Renée’s dressing room in La Curée and had been invited to speak at a Zola symposium at Paris VII—Zola was big with the poststructuralist crowd for the same reason he was unpopular with Henry James."
"Her exquisitely Grafted human female body elicited certain responses in his supremely healthy human male body."
"It was she, rather than my aunt, who taught me the workings of the female body (in words other than the anatomy textbooks I had previously depended upon, which concealed and obfuscated rather than clarified)."