Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

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

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Bill Clegg.

He's the author of a first novel, Did You Ever Have a Family?

No question, Mark. And he's the author of two memoirs. Both of them,

memoirs of addiction. Portrait of an addict as a young man and 90 days. We'll be talking about the novel today. And let's begin by why there's no question here. Well, there's no question, Mark, because when I first read that line in Alan

Shapiro's poem, song, and dance, which was given to me by a writer who had

picked those words as the epigraph of her novel. The writer is Haven Kimmel. Her novel was called

Something Rising. And I read that line and it just, it hit me like a ton of bricks and it appeared

to me right away as more of a

statement than a question and kind of an explanation for like an exhaustion and grief that can

only come from from being part of a family as well as a gratitude and an acknowledgement of the blessing,

which has sort of been my experience of family,

which is sort of kind of blessing and burden.

...