You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Am Holmes, the author most recently of In a Country of Mothers,

published recently by Alfred A. Knopf, and the author as well of the novel Jack

and the collection of short stories, The Safety of Objects.

Well, I'll leap in immediately.

It seems to me that this novel,

which is about a young and disturbed woman

who goes to see a therapist

who decides that her patient is in in fact, her long-lost daughter.

And the book, which might have a kind of twilight zone premise

or a kind of comic presence is instead sort of relentlessly creepy, kind of as if when we're reading a book by Judy Bloom, but one in which there was going to be no happiness.

You know, there would be all of the problems but no solutions because the solution giver doesn't have any herself.

I wondered how this all happened.

How it happened?

I would say, I think it's interesting that you're saying that there seems to be all the problems and no solutions.

I guess one of the things that I'm always trying to do in my fiction is to evoke, I think,

realities that are kind of under-explored. And I think we're at a moment where too often in

contemporary fiction people are looking for a solution. You present a story such as this, but then it has a

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