Sara Torres’ ‘The Seduction’ Is The Perfect Pride Month Read. We Talked To Her About About Queer Desire, Dating Apps, And Why We All Need To Hear “I Love You” More Than Once.

Sara Torres’ The Seduction is a sapphic romance about two women, referred to only by their professional titles, “the photographer” and “the writer”, who spend the summer together under the pretense of professional collaboration while harboring their own very distinct hopes for where the relationship might progress.

It’s full of tension and anticipation that is refreshingly not centered on whether queerness itself can be reciprocated, but in the different ways it may or may not manifest between two people.

The novel was originally published in Spanish in 2024 and is now available in English via a Simon & Schuster translation by Mara Faye Lethem. We spoke to Torres, who is a poet as well as a novelist, in addition to a PhD specializing in theories of lesbian queer desire and fetish, about her characters, communication, desire, and modern dating.

This interview has been edited slightly for readability.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: I also speak Spanish, and after reading the translation I have such a desire to read your original work. The novel itself has so much interpretation of words and actions and expressions and silence and all of the subtext. And I’m just curious about the type of trust you have to build with a translator and the kinds of conversations you have to have about preserving what’s not explicitly spelled out on the page and what that looks like for you?

SARA TORRES: Yeah, it was very beautiful, the work with both the translator and the editor, because I feel that the editor was always putting her feminist gaze in the readings, and that is very important. There are many things that need to be translated apart from language, because there is also the lesbian experience, no? The lesbian perspective that is very often mistranslated by the reader who is not queer. There are many details that can get lost, so I believe there was this beautiful consciousness about all these little details: the feminist translation, the queer translation, and the translation between languages.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: I love that. It brought to mind another translation that happened last year where HBO had a different title for their show, also called “The Seduction”, that was meant to appeal to English speaking audiences who wouldn’t recognize the French title, “Merteuil” which comes from Dangerous Liaisons. I was introduced to those characters in my twenties through Robert Green’s The Art of Seduction and that whole pop cultural exploration of fictional and real life “seducers” and their different approaches.

I also had the pleasure of seeing some of your interviews in Spanish, talking about the ways we’re all indoctrinated with normative concepts of desire, whether that’s in a nature documentary or elsewhere, and I’m curious, what do you think pop culture’s biggest misconception about desire and seduction is? But, on the other hand, do you have a favorite fictional seduction or seducer that you hold near and dear or put on a pedestal?

SARA TORRES: I really like Carol by Patricia Highsmith. I think that was the first time that as a teenager I could read something that was about seduction, about women seducing each other, and there was also a very kind atmosphere to this seduction. There was a principle of care that was always present and not only between the main characters, but also we have this character of the ex-lover of Carol who is a best friend and is always there supporting and is part of Carol’s family.

So I believe I wanted to continue this genealogy of lovers that can become friends, that can become family. I think queer people, historically, leave behind their origins and sometimes even their family, and we build families with our allies and our lovers through time, and I wanted to tell a story of seduction that was not based in these dynamics of opposition and complementarity. That is the main scheme of the heterosexual seduction that we have been taught.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: I would love to talk about names and identities and labels. It’s a very intentional decision to name these characters “the photographer” and “the writer”, and we come into contact with all the ways those labels impact their relationship and create these preconceived notions about who each other is, whether that’s the writer thinking the photographer is just there to steal her image and run off, or the photographer has certain ideas of how the writer should be efficient with words or use words in general. And they read between the lines with varying levels of success.

What did it mean to you to write a seduction, not just between two women and two queer women, but two artists?

SARA TORRES: That was very important for me because I think they represent parts of the self that I can recognize in myself. I could be both characters. So I kind of separated my potentials into two different paths.

There is one part of our contemporary work as artists that is very, very, very directed towards production and results. You do something because you need to produce something that is legible in the moment. Even very often we are asking for support or fellowships, and we need to define what we are going to do before starting to do the investigation. So it’s this idea of creating, like fast products, and there is another part of myself that is very, very linked to another way of experiencing time.

I need to experience time in a different manner in which things and events are suspended, and I can just walk around and get lost in my own path. And so, I think I had to contemplate these two realities inside of myself and then I decided to create two characters that were led by two different forces, also to put them in conversation and to see the conflicts between them.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: There’s a really lovely moment that feels kind of “vampire-like”, where the photographer needs to be invited into the home twice, and then there’s this really lovely echo of that moment, in the writer’s journal, where she’s saying she needs the photographer to express her desire not once, not twice, but enough times that there’s no shred of doubt so she can alleviate her fears about their age difference or power dynamic or hero worship.

We see the backstories of these women, and why they may approach communication in these ways because of their wounds or their childhoods. I’m curious, just, on a larger scale, in general in relationships, what does it mean to you for someone to not be able to just accept that first communication? To need to hear something twice or to need that reassurance? Is that something we all have? Where does it come from?

SARA TORRES: I think sometimes we enter into certain economy of language in which it appears for us that once you have said something, this thing is performative forever, you know? And sometimes people who need a lot of reassurance through language seem to be insecure, but I believe that language is not about information, but about relationships and affect. So you create reality, the affective reality between two [people] by repetition of certain words and by approaching certainty slowly.

I do not believe that once one word has been said, its force can last forever. I think that we know very well as humans that affective reality is always changing, and I think that needing reassurance is not about being needy, but maybe also about being intelligent on the matters of the bodies that change all the time. So, I wanted to make this visible, this need for repetitive language, repetitive expressions. We need to hear “I love you” many, many times in order to be certain about it.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: It’s so, so true and so relatable, and I love that it came from both of them at the same time. There’s another wonderful scene, when Greta comes into the picture, and we’re talking about, seduction in television or pornography as opposed to fiction, and she says you can have as many sex scenes as you want because lesbians have a deficit of content.

Having read novels like Carol and studying desire and queerness in general, in an academic sense, what did you want to bring to this novel that you felt might be lacking from the existing queer canon? What did you want to inject into the discourse that you didn’t feel was already present?

SARA TORRES: So, this novel is very connected to the essay that I just published in Spain that is called “El Pensamiento Erótico”. “El Pensamento Erótico” is a book on the heterosexual construction of desire. So what I wanted to show in the book, is maybe not very subversive in the first look, but then you understand why it’s political. I wanted to show that the desire of minorities is also very fixed to heterosexual fantasies and to the norm. That the norm is the text that educates our desire, our shared desire, so our grammatics of fantasy repeat and organize the world into opposites.

So, what I wanted to show was the fantasy and the images that the photographer had when feeling desire but not being able to have a real encounter with the writer. So, we don’t see them having sex. We see a lot of fantasies that develop in this waiting, in this longing, and the fantasies are structured in a very normative manner. This is what I wanted to show.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: My next question was going to be about those very fantasies, and I would love to compare the English and the Spanish versions side by side because what I found fascinating was just the use of different tenses. There would be present tense and conditional and future where you kind of lose yourself and start to question what’s happening. The fantasy becomes real, and there is a blurred line, where the clarification comes later, but in the middle of the fantasy we’re wondering, “Is this happening? Is it real?”

And sometimes our own fantasies can feel that way, can feel just as real as something that might happen to us in real life. And it’s kind of in that ambiguity that maybe, you know, as readers we start to doubt a little bit at least the photographer’s interpretation of these events and her fantasies. And it’s amazing because the writer’s point of view is delayed. So we, as readers, start to grow impatient in parallel to the photographer’s own impatience. And it was so beautiful.

How did that structure evolve for you? Did you always know we were going to get that inner monologue from the other character? When did you feel it was the right point to go “OK, finally”, we can have access to her thoughts and her feelings?

SARA TORRES: So this was very organic, I think. First of all, my main point of view was the desperation and longing, especially in a very pessimistic type of psyche. I wanted to talk a lot about dysphoria, like body dysphoria, and how we imagine our body when we feel we can be potentially rejected, how we feel vulnerable when we desire, because I think we very often miss this inner monologue, this anxious inner monologue that we have when we are exposing our bodies to the potentiality of an encounter. Many bodies hallucinate a lot of suffering about our own body image, and if the confirmation of the mutuality of desire is not present, and if it takes a long time to have this explicit confirmation that something is mutual, very often we hallucinate more and more.

So I wanted to investigate this inner monologue and hallucinations that are sometimes manifested through sexual fantasies, but other times through fantasies of the body as a monster, more specifically in the context of summer in which the body is exposed because there is such heat, at least in Spain.

So I was exploring this inner monologue and I knew from the very beginning that the writer was in a very loving position even though the photographer was imagining rejection. I wanted to show how very often we say to ourselves horrible things that the others are not even imagining a little bit about us. I wanted to heal the reader from the type of obsession that the photographer has. I wanted the reader to kind of rest in the analogy of the loop of consciousness that the photographer is having, and in order to have this healing, we needed the perspective, the loving perspective of the other protagonist. So, I realized at some point that I needed to include this perspective to write a sweetest kind of resolution of the book.

In the original in Spanish, we have a quote by Marguerite Duras that says something like, “Why would you imagine it sad and cruel and not sweetly?”, like the entire thing could be imagined through a more kind framework, but desire very often is projected through frustration and pain instead of through sweetness and kindness. So I think the perspective of the writer is giving us this frame of kindness, and she’s seeing the desperation of the photographer, and she’s trying to make it easier for her. It’s just that the photographer cannot read the intentions of the writer.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: Which was so fascinating to me because, you know, she struggled so hard with interpreting their in-person interactions, but yet she claimed to be able to kind of read all of the subtext in her writing. So just that gap between claiming to know the writer’s book wasn’t about a man, but a woman with strong hands, and then, just the day to day interactions, there’s such a gap between what’s being said out loud and maybe the feelings and thoughts that are actually being communicated and how they’re received.

SARA TORRES: Yeah, we are so ready for rejection in our imagination that we become very defensive. So we generally imagine terrible scenarios of rejection. At least women and queer people very often do because we think that our value depends on our body, and our body is always under scrutiny in a very cruel manner. I think we are ready to receive something horrible from the other, so I wanted to make this a scenario in which it is possible to find a gaze that is kinder than yours.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: Oh, that’s so well put. You answered this a little bit, right? About where these two characters come from and how they represent a different side of yourself. There’s so many, very explicit descriptions of seduction, whether that’s “the race where no one chases and no one flees”, or this “third space where the two of them can exist together”, or “a path from radical difference to a desired familiarity”.

The characters are both a part of you. You can relate to both of them. Where do you agree with each of them the most? Are there any areas where maybe you as a holistic combination of the two disagree with anything maybe that they’ve said, or the way that they’re projecting their own perceptions of desire and seduction onto each other?

SARA TORRES: I think there is something in the writer that is really aspirational in a manner that I want to be her. I want to be calmer, or I want to be less anxious. So I imagine this horizon in which you can be more contemplative about reality without having this need for dominating the present.

I think the photographer really represents this part of me that needs to control reality in order not to feel vulnerable. The writer has this skill of contemplating without acting or intervening in reality, but of course, the writer is not perfect, and this is also problematic because not intervening and contemplating can also be a way of controlling from a certain distance.

And what the writer controls in a different way is the narration, without intervening, but by creating the scenarios. Because if you think about it, she has the power of creating narratives and scenarios. It’s her house. She knows the rituals. She puts the limits on the rituals. She organizes time and space, and through doing that she feels more secure. And she feels that it’s not really putting a lot of tension in reality, but when she leaves her own scenario, when she leaves the narration and Greta appears and the characters reorganize the narration, then you have her deep, deep pain as well. So I think none of them is perfect and it’s just like trying to be in relationship in the way in which they know.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: That concept of imperfection—I was just amazed how many different aspects of queerness and womanhood and femininity you were able to not only address but deconstruct in 160 pages, and I understand you have a background in poetry, so that serves as an explanation in and of itself.

But just the conversation around mothers and bodies, whether that is sexual, medical, the subjective experience of living in them, whether being maternal and caretaking necessarily is connected to motherhood, and how it exists outside of it, and then by the time this quote arrived—“What right did I have to desire from others once again, something so similar to traditional love to the ideal of loyalty we were raised with?“—that juxtaposition was so relatable, so vulnerable.

We can exist as queer people, having deconstructed so much of what we were raised with in these structures and these norms and still have aspects of it that we cling to or long for or that haunt us as ghosts in the way you described in the book. I’m just curious, what does that mean to you? What aspects of “traditional love” do you still hold a candle for?

SARA TORRES: I always try to be very honest or naked in contradiction, because I believe that we all inherit a very old unconscious that is organized in structures, myths, language. And our affects were really raised in the limits of these myths, this language, these regulative images.

So I’m very honest in the way in which our libido, our propulsions, our affects take form in between limits. And sometimes they do something against the limits or through the limits. We are also escaping the limits and creating things somewhere else, but because we have lived in the margins, it doesn’t mean that the structure didn’t affect us.

So I believe that it is very kind for everyone to be sincere about how the norm is always capturing our possibilities in terms of imagination. I look inside of myself, I contemplate, and I try to understand how my hope is also involved with all narratives of love and desire.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: I’m curious to get your take on some new narratives, and just modern dating in general.

Do you think dating apps ruin seduction? I was thinking about them through the lens of this novel, and on the one hand, there’s the parallel where it’s a photograph that serves as the catalyst for this infatuation. The photographer’s not swiping, but it’s that same concept that a single image can inspire something that develops over time, but, at the same time, I was questioning whether the kind of patience and proximity and anticipation we see in the novel can exist under the pressures of the labeled “dating app” where you have all these expectations that kind of obliterate the ambiguity and forces people to have conversations or decisions maybe prematurely.

The one line, “she doesn’t yet know what the other wishes, how could she if she hasn’t even had time to comprehend her own”, really resonated with me in this idea of, you know, do we even have time to breathe and to feel out chemistry and organic relationship if there’s that pressure to “go on a date” or immediately define what an interaction is or will be?

SARA TORRES: I remember around 10 years ago in London, I arrived to the city and the only way of having friends, meeting people, and knowing new lovers was through apps, but it was an old version of technology, I believe, and our usage of dating apps in that moment was very related to having long, long conversations before even like having a coffee.

So you will talk about animals, nature, and literature for a month, and then you will like at some point meet for a beer, and like at that time you could already ask that person about, I don’t know, “how is your sister? Was she fine with her exam with her final exam?”, because you were like building a narrative together. And I do believe that many of us need to build complex, subtle, and beautiful narratives in order to prepare the body to encounter each other.

So I’m not so scared of dating apps, but the ways in which we use them, no? I think there are a lot of interests, economic interests, on changing our dating behaviors more towards the model of consumption because they want to build people who are like the perfect consumers in every aspect of their lives. If they’re not a consumer in terms of love or relationships, you already have a place for resistance in yourself that can also materialize in different resistances to power.

If you know your times in terms of encountering each other, loving each other, you can also have the capacity to ask for your times in order to evaluate reality around you, in order to think or work or have expectations about the future. So I do believe that we need to use these apps in our own way.

I know it’s not easy, and the technologies are changing, and the apps are changing their design all the time, so we are more directed towards that type of superficial fast consumer, but we have always been able to queer structures. So I believe in queering these apps as well and making them the path for making friends, bonds, and political allies instead of making them supermarkets of identities that we can consume.

NICOLE STAWIARSKI: That is so well said. I was curious about the notebook scene, where the writer leaves the notebook out and the photographer reads it. As a writer, would you read somebody else’s writing that they left out, but also, would you ever leave something so personal where somebody could read it without the intention that they might flip through it? I’m just curious, was the photographer correct in the actions she took and her interpretation of what that exchange meant?

SARA TORRES: I think for me, leaving the reading there, it was an invitation. Very often writer’s paper will not show voluntarily, but still they want them to be read, no? So to me it’s like leaving a piece of intimacy exposed for the other to find it, but at the same time, as a reader, I will be very scared of reading intimacy of the other. I think I’m curious, so I know if my guilt could really separate me from opening a book, and just like read it or a diary or whatever, I think I will maybe fall into the temptation of reading it, but at the same time, I know that it’s not a good idea.

I believe in, in mystery, in the need for certain part of mystery. I believe in protecting the other from our secrets. There is one part of intimacy and desire that cannot even be told, because it’s obscure even for ourselves. We don’t know everything about our own desire, so it’s a little bit cruel to share information as something that could appear as objective if it is obscure even for ourselves.