Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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 Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Andrew Sean Greer, whose novel, The Story of a Marriage

was recently published by Faris Strauss and Cheru.

He's the author in order of a collection of short stories,

How It Was for Me, The Path of Minor Planets, A Novel, and The Confessions of Max Tivoli.

Now, I think it would be useful to begin by opening with the opening section of the book,

in fact, because the book is posed, as I think a good deal of your work is, on the question

of unknowability and of concealment. And I thought

the opening paragraph would be a good one to illustrate. Yeah, I think that gets right to it.

And it didn't used to be the opening of the book. It was actually much later on until I sort of discovered that was really the heart of it.

Once again, you know, I don't think I knew that all the books were about that.

Oh, here's how it starts.

We think we know the ones we love, our husbands, our wives.

We know them. We are them sometimes. When separated at a party,

we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote

that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation,

of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare as it turns white to brown, then drop it satisfied, into the cup.

...