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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm pleased to have as my guest, Andrew Holleran, whose most recent book is grief.

It's published by Hyperion.

He began, of course, with the novel, Dancer from the Dance. It was followed by Knights in Aruba. There's a book of essays about AIDS and culture that had appeared originally in Christopher Street called Crown Zero. A novel called The Beauty of Men, a book of short stories called In September

The Light Changes, The Stories of Andrew Holleran, and Now Grief.

These books have been a series of Aclef books in a sense, yes, Romance Aclay?

I think so. I think the first one, dancer from the dance, was probably the most imagined,

although it was certainly about my life, the life I was leading in New York.

Grand Zero, yes, Knights and Aruba, yes, to the point where I thought that book

possibly could have been a memoir, and that always bothered me. And yeah, right up to the

present. I would say the exception might be in September, the light changes. Those were pretty

imagined, too. But one of the wonderful things that I read about Proust somewhere was that Proust felt or said that he couldn't make things up.

And so while you feel guilty sometimes as a writer for not being more of a Harry Potter kind of writer where you just make up whole cloth,

my taste has always been for a kind of autobiographical fiction.

And when I was still in high school and was reading Scott Fitzgerald for class, I remember when I found out that his life resembled Tenders a Knight, I thought, well, gee, he's not a writer then.

He didn't make anything up.

But that's the kind of writing I love.

I want the writing to be invested with some kind of personal experience and emotion.

...