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 Silverblatt.

Welcome to Bookworm.

We're here for the second week with Anne Beatt,

whose new novel picturing Will has just been published by Random House.

It's no secret to listeners of the show that I am a big fan of Anne Beattie,

and lucky also to be a friend, and it's a pleasure to have you here today.

Thanks. Good to be here.

You've been accused of being a witch by someone who says that you have an uncanny eye

and that you remember things years after they've occurred in greater detail than you remember them immediately.

Is that true?

Absolutely true, yes.

I think one of the things that interest me so much about writing is that something will suddenly

occur to me as I'm in the process of sitting there at the typewriter doing these stories, and it'll be

absolutely vivid. I mean, just there starkly, and it's never anything very momentous. It's not

like it really was a dramatic incident or an inherently dramatic thing that I saw, but it will

be there as though I could reach out and touch it and put it in there. And if I hadn't invented a new context, I don't think I would ever have remembered.

I would never have plucked it out of the subconscious or wherever those things come from.

I once told you that I had loved an ashtray with cherry-pits and in a particular story,

...