on Attention
Attention has always suited Lara Strathmore. She knows how to enter a room without announcing herself, how to dress so people remember the silhouette, and how to leave just enough unsaid for curiosity to do the rest. But attention is complicated territory for Lara. She has mistaken it for intimacy, pursued it as proof, distrusted its power and occasionally wielded it herself. Over coffee in Manhattan, we talk about beauty, jealousy, older men, social media, her father’s approval, and the complicated pleasure of still wanting to be noticed.
Studio Sirela: Do you notice when you walk into a room and people look at you?
Lara Strathmore: Of course. I wish I could give you the lovely answer and say I’m oblivious, but I’m not. I know when someone looks twice. I know when a woman looks at my coat and when a man looks at my legs, and those are very different looks. I know when someone recognizes me now, too, although I’m still slightly suspicious that I have something on my face. Being aware of attention doesn’t mean I’m always enjoying it, but pretending not to notice feels like another performance, and I already have enough of those.
Studio Sirela: Do you enjoy it?
Lara Strathmore: Sometimes enormously. That’s probably not the answer women are supposed to give. We’re allowed to be beautiful, but admitting that we enjoy the effect of beauty is considered somehow less beautiful. There are evenings when I’ve dressed carefully and I walk into a restaurant and feel the room register me, and yes, it’s pleasurable. It can make you feel very present in your body. The mistake is believing the room has told you anything important about yourself.
Studio Sirela: You said you can distinguish between someone looking at your coat and someone looking at your legs. Which look do you prefer?
Lara Strathmore: The coat, probably, although that may just be snobbery. If someone notices the cut of a coat, I immediately credit them with discernment they may not possess. A beautiful coat is also something I chose, whereas my legs are largely an accident of genetics and years of riding horses. But there are days when I prefer the other look.
Studio Sirela: What kind of compliment works on you every time?
Lara Strathmore: Anything about my mind, unfortunately. Tell me I’m beautiful and I’ll say thank you. Tell me I said something you haven’t stopped thinking about and I’m in trouble. Specificity is particularly dangerous. If someone remembers a sentence I said three weeks ago, or asks about an obscure thing I mentioned once, I feel it immediately. I know perfectly well that remembering details can be charm, technique, genuine interest or simply a good memory, but knowledge doesn’t prevent the reaction. This is one of the irritating things about studying psychology. Your nervous system refuses to respect your education.
Studio Sirela: You call specificity dangerous. Has attention become something you distrust?
Lara Strathmore: I’m more suspicious of what I do with it than of attention itself. Attention is information. It tells you that you’ve occupied somebody’s mind for a moment. I used to add quite a lot after that. If someone noticed me closely, I assumed I mattered to them. If they wanted my company, I assumed they valued it. If they seemed fascinated by me, I assumed fascination had some moral quality. It doesn’t. People pay very close attention to things they want to possess, understand, sleep with, sell to, write about, rescue or simply enjoy for an evening. Being interesting to someone tells you almost nothing about what they’ll do with your vulnerability.
Studio Sirela: You make attention sound almost transactional.
Lara Strathmore: It often is. Look at the industry I briefly stepped into. Entire rooms of intelligent people are paid very well to understand where attention goes, how long it stays and what makes it convert into action. Social media does the same thing with prettier interfaces. Dating does it with worse metrics. We pretend attention is spontaneous because that’s more romantic, but everyone knows how to manipulate it to some degree. The interesting question is what happens when you stop pretending you don’t.
Studio Sirela: Do you manipulate attention?
Lara Strathmore: Yes. Obviously. I know how to be quiet at the right moment. I know that not answering immediately can make someone think about you longer. I know what certain clothes do. None of this makes me manipulative really. Most women learn some version of it before they’re old enough to call it strategy. What I’m less proud of is that there have been times when I withheld attention because I wanted to feel someone reaching for it.
Studio Sirela: That’s quite different.
Lara Strathmore: Yes, and much less flattering. Silence can be a boundary, but it can also be bait. I’ve used both and occasionally told myself one was the other.
Studio Sirela: How do you know the difference?
Lara Strathmore: If I’m checking my phone to see whether they’ve noticed my silence, it probably isn’t serenity.
Studio Sirela: Are you good at being ignored?
Lara Strathmore: Absolutely not. I’m better at looking good while being ignored. Different skill.
Studio Sirela: What happens internally?
Lara Strathmore: First indignation, which is very unattractive. Then analysis. I start constructing explanations, and because I’m trained in psychology I can construct excellent ones. They’re nuanced, compassionate and often completely imaginary. Then pride arrives and says I don’t care. Pride has a very elegant voice. Eventually, if I’m behaving sensibly, I put the phone somewhere else and go outside. If I’m behaving badly, I post something beautiful and insist to myself that the timing is coincidental.
Studio Sirela: Do you look to see whether a particular person viewed it?
Lara Strathmore: Well, there have been particular people whose names I’ve looked for. Sometimes seeing the name gave me satisfaction for about twelve seconds, which is a humiliatingly poor return on emotional investment.
Studio Sirela: What did their attention prove?
Lara Strathmore: Nothing. That’s why twelve seconds was all I got.
Studio Sirela: You seem able to laugh at that now, but there have been periods when someone’s attention carried much more weight for you. Why?
Lara Strathmore: Because attention from certain people can feel like admission to a world. That’s especially true when you’re young and the other person appears established. They have the office, the certainty, the vocabulary, the life that already seems edited. If someone like that turns their attention toward you, you can mistake the feeling of being selected for evidence that you’ve become their equal. You borrow some of their authority because they’ve chosen to look at you. It’s intoxicating.
Studio Sirela: Is that part of the attraction of older men for you?
Lara Strathmore: Partly. I also find some older men attractive. But yes, attention from someone accomplished can carry an extra charge. If a man has seen a great deal and still finds you interesting, it feels different from being admired by someone who is discovering the world alongside you. Or it did to me. I’m more careful now about confusing someone’s experience with their authority over mine. Or at least that's what I tell myself.
Studio Sirela: Would attention from a man your own age feel less valuable?
Lara Strathmore: That’s a horrible question because the honest answer makes me sound awful. Historically, sometimes yes. Not because men my age are inherently less interesting, but because I attached status to difficulty. Attention that seemed harder to obtain felt more meaningful once I obtained it. That’s such an embarrassing little economic model of desire, isn’t it? Scarcity creates value. My professors would be thrilled.
Studio Sirela: Does that mean availability can make someone less attractive to you?
Lara Strathmore: It has. I dislike admitting that because it’s unfair to people who are emotionally straightforward. There have been moments when kindness felt less electric than ambiguity simply because ambiguity gave me more to solve. If someone was very clear that he liked me, part of my mind could become restless. Where’s the puzzle? What am I earning?
Studio Sirela: Has that changed?
Lara Strathmore: Ask me after I’ve successfully dated a kind, available man for six months. Until then, I have theories.
Studio Sirela: What about female attention? Does it affect you differently?
Lara Strathmore: Completely. A beautiful woman’s attention can make me more self-conscious than a man’s. Not necessarily sexually, although sometimes attraction complicates everything, but because women notice different things. A woman will notice that your hem is wrong, that you’re pretending not to be tired, that you’ve changed your hair by half an inch. There’s also a particular pleasure in another woman whose taste you admire admiring yours. If a chic woman asks where my coat is from, I can live on that for days.
Studio Sirela: Is that vanity?
Lara Strathmore: Obviously. Vanity isn’t terminal. We can survive admitting it.
Studio Sirela: And jealousy?
Lara Strathmore: Less chic, but yes.
Studio Sirela: What makes you jealous?
Lara Strathmore: If someone is prettier than I am, richer, cleverer, more successful, I can usually admire her unless I’m having a particularly fragile morning. But if someone whose attention mattered to me suddenly gives another woman the particular kind of attention I thought belonged to us, I feel it physically. It’s not even always about wanting the person. Sometimes it’s the realization that what felt singular may have been a pattern.
Studio Sirela: What do you do with that feeling?
Lara Strathmore: Initially? Become extremely dignified. Which should worry everyone.
Studio Sirela: Meaning?
Lara Strathmore: I become nicer. Calmer. Very reasonable. I will say things like, “Of course, it’s completely fine.” Then later I’ll tell my friend Zoe the truth and she’ll say something offensive and useful.
Studio Sirela: What does Zoe notice about your relationship with attention that you don’t?
Lara Strathmore: She knows when I’m pretending not to care. She’s very irritating that way. She also understands that I can turn attention into a project. If someone is inconsistent, I’ll start studying the inconsistency rather than asking whether I enjoy how it makes me feel. Zoe has very little patience for this. She’ll say, “Do you actually like him, or do you like winning?” Sometimes I hate her.
Studio Sirela: Have you ever liked winning more?
Lara Strathmore: Yes.
Studio Sirela: Did you know it at the time?
Lara Strathmore: No. That’s why it worked.
Studio Sirela: You grew up in a world where appearances mattered. What did attention look like in your family?
Lara Strathmore: Subtle. Loud attention was considered slightly vulgar. Nobody was applauding you for entering a room. Approval arrived through small things like being included in an adult conversation, my father asking what I thought, my mother letting me wear something of hers. Achievement received attention, composure received attention, good manners received attention. Neediness did not. So I became very good at producing the version of myself that elicited the right response without appearing to request it.
Studio Sirela: Do you still perform for your father’s attention?
Lara Strathmore: Less than I did, but yes. If I write something I’m proud of, his opinion still has an unreasonable amount of gravitational force. The strange part is that he doesn’t demand this nearly as explicitly as the version of him in my head does. At some point you internalize an audience and then blame the original audience for continuing to attend.
Studio Sirela: What would you like him to notice without you having to show him?
Lara Strathmore: That I’m serious about the life I’m building. Not serious in the solemn sense, but to me, writing isn’t decorative. Psychology isn’t a respectable placeholder until I decide what I’m doing. The emotional world interests me intellectually. I want that to count as ambition.
Studio Sirela: Is public attention making that easier or harder?
Lara Strathmore: Both. Being read is extraordinary. Someone can be sitting in London or somewhere I’ve never been and recognize themselves in a sentence I wrote alone in my apartment. That’s still miraculous to me. But numbers are dangerous because they give you the appearance of objective judgment. A piece gets more attention and suddenly you’re tempted to believe it’s better. A photograph gets more attention than an essay and some primitive part of you says, well, apparently we know what everyone wants. You have to resist allowing measurement to become meaning.
Studio Sirela: Do you?
Lara Strathmore: Not always. I check.
Studio Sirela: Likes?
Lara Strathmore: Likes, saves, comments. I am not floating above capitalism in a linen dress.
Studio Sirela: What kind of comment stays with you?
Lara Strathmore: The specific ones. Again, specificity. Someone once wrote that something I’d written made her call her sister after they hadn’t spoken for months. I remember that. I don’t remember how many likes the post had. Then occasionally someone comments something absurdly intimate about my appearance and I think, how did we get here? There is a photograph of my face directly above your comment. You don’t need to describe what you’d like to do with it.
Studio Sirela: Does being publicly visible change the way you inhabit your body?
Lara Strathmore: Yes, and I don’t love that. You start seeing yourself from outside. You’re walking down the street and suddenly you’re aware of the angle of your coat or whether your hair looks like the version people recognize. It’s very easy for the body to become an object you’re managing rather than the place you’re living. Riding helps. A horse does not care whether you’re photogenic. Your body has to work. Your thighs are there to communicate, your hands have a job, your balance matters. I come back into myself.
Studio Sirela: Sex can do that too.
Lara Strathmore: It can.
Studio Sirela: Can attention during sex become another performance for you?
Lara Strathmore: Yes. There is a particular kind of sex where you’re partly experiencing yourself through the other person’s desire, and that can be incredibly erotic. Being watched can be erotic. Knowing someone is losing composure because of you can be erotic. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But there’s also sex where you become so aware of being desired that you stop asking whether you’re actually desiring. You’re monitoring the effect you’re having. You’re almost outside your body, watching yourself succeed.
Studio Sirela: Have you done that?
Lara Strathmore: Yes.
Studio Sirela: And known you were doing it?
Lara Strathmore: Sometimes only afterward. You can mistake being very good at creating desire for being deeply inside your own. They can look identical from the other side of the bed.
Studio Sirela: What tells you the difference now?
Lara Strathmore: Whether I remember myself. That sounds strange, but when I’m genuinely present I remember sensory things like someone’s skin, my breathing, whether I wanted something to continue. When I’m performing, what I remember most clearly is their reaction. Their face. What they said. Whether I affected them. That’s useful information.
Studio Sirela: You seem to enjoy having an effect on people.
Lara Strathmore: I do. Is that terrible?
Studio Sirela: No. But you sometimes speak as though attention is something that happens to you, when you are also quite skilled at producing it.
Lara Strathmore: That’s fair. I dislike the idea of manipulation when I’m the object of it and become much more linguistically generous when I’m the one doing it. Then it’s “presence” or “mystery” or “knowing how to hold a room.” Very convenient. The truth is that I enjoy influence. I enjoy saying something and seeing someone reconsider. I enjoy being desired. I enjoy being memorable. The question isn’t whether those pleasures are morally pure. They’re not required to be. The question is whether I know when I’m chasing the reaction instead of the thing itself.
Studio Sirela: And do you?
Lara Strathmore: More often.
Studio Sirela: Not always?
Lara Strathmore: Certainly not. I’m still on Instagram.
Studio Sirela: What’s the longest you’ve gone recently without checking whether anyone wanted your attention?
Lara Strathmore: That’s beautifully phrased and deeply rude. Probably when I’m riding. A few hours. My phone stays in the tack room because once it fell out of my pocket and my horse, August, nearly stepped on it, which would have been an extremely expensive lesson in mindfulness.
Studio Sirela: Would part of you have enjoyed the phone being destroyed?
Lara Strathmore: Immensely. Provided someone immediately bought me another one.
Studio Sirela: Naturally.
Lara Strathmore: I’m interested in freedom, not inconvenience.
Studio Sirela: Last thing. When you leave here, what are you doing?
Lara Strathmore: I’m meeting Zoe downtown. She wants noodles from this tiny place where the tables are practically touching and nobody looks elegant eating anything. I’m wearing cream silk, so this is already a tactical error.
Studio Sirela: Will you post it?
Lara Strathmore: Probably not.
Studio Sirela: Why not?
Lara Strathmore: Because I don’t need everyone to know where I am all the time.
Studio Sirela: Will you take a photograph?
Lara Strathmore: Obviously.
Studio Sirela: For whom?
Lara Strathmore: Me.
Studio Sirela: Only you?
Lara Strathmore: Ask me tomorrow.
A work of contemporary women’s literary fiction, Lara’s latest novella, Soft Power, is an introspective, character-driven novella about forbidden intimacy, psychological power, and female self-discovery in modern New York.
Tropes Include Age Gap | Office Tension | Forbidden Mentorship | Female Self‑Discovery | Luxe Manhattan | Psychological Intimacy
