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Hello everybody. How are you?

Welcome to the Other People podcast. It's nice to be with you. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. Today, on the program, my guest is Sheila Hetty, author of the novel Pure Color. So I had that this sentence, God is three art critics in the sky when I was writing, how should a person be? And I sort of thought, well, what does that mean? Like, I don't know where that sentence came from, but I remember walking around with it in my head and walking around with it on a cue card and trying to figure out, how does this belong in the book? What does this mean? Why do I have this thought? So that was around 2005. And then I guess when I started writing this book in early 2018,

I was like, well, maybe here's the time now to think about what that sentence was all about.

That is Sheila Hetty talking about her new novel, Pure Color,

available now from Farrar Strauss and Giroux.

It is a beautiful book, philosophical and big-hearted and at times whimsical.

It is a novel that at its core is about grief and patrimony,

and it is a book that has a lot on its mind, as do all of Sheila's books.

Pure Color is about life and death and art and criticism.

It's about the life beyond life, if that's a way of putting it.

And it tells a story that is grappling with the grandeur and mystery of the cosmos.

And it also brings into unusually sharp focus the beauty and the magic of the everyday.

It's a moving book.

With a sweetheart.

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