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 welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Blanche McCrary Boy, the author most recently of The Revolution of Little Girls, but also the author of The Redneck Way of Knowledge, as well as two previous

novels.

The book was recently published by Alfred A. Knopf, probably our favorite literary publisher. Tell me,

is this a redneck book? My mother says it's not. My mother said, why does everybody

keep calling you a redneck? And you know, you're not a redneck. So I try to explain to her

that what I mean is I'm not an aristocrat.

To put it a little bit differently,

the family and the revolution of little girls, I think,

is probably more related to the Snopesis than they are to the Compsons.

This is a book that, as Gertrude Stein, like to recommend for books, that begins again and again.

It tells its story from a number of points of view in time.

And it's sort of as if the narrator is learning how not quite to tell so many whoppers as she goes along,

so she tells her story again and again, more honestly each time.

That's a kind of unusual way of putting a novel together.

I wondered how it came about.

Well, I like a lot of good ideas it came about by accident.

I think of it a little bit differently.

...