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?

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

We're here in the studio today at KCRW with Mary Gordon,

who made a very startling debut onto the stage of the fictional world,

with her first novel, Final Payments,

and subsequent books have been the company of women,

men and angels, temporary shelter,

and now most recently, and new from Viking Press, The Other Side.

Mary, this is a novel that, in ways that are very traditional in fiction deals with the family.

It's been a time when in many ways the family, both in fiction and in the world, has been assaulted.

What brings you back to that subject?

Well, I don't like to think that I'm dealing with it in a traditional way, and certainly

formally I'm not dealing with it traditionally.

I guess what interested me about it was exploring a family and how it would change over time.

Also exploring the immigrant experience as it would change over time. Also, exploring the immigrant experience as it would change

from generation to generation. So I begin with Vincent and Ellen, who came to America,

approximately 1910 from Ireland. And what occurred to me was that for people of my basic age group people in their 40s, we still, if our grandparents

or our parents came from Europe, we still had the sense of being out of something, out of

the Main Street in America. There were some forks we didn't know how to use. There were

...