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 Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm here this week in the studio with Carol Mesao,

the author most recently of The Art Lover,

recently published by North Point Press,

also of Ghost Dance, published, I believe, in...

86.

Also by North Point.

These books, well, the ghost dance when I discovered it, really somehow caught my fancy since it

deals with characters, as this one does too, as absences in a sort. People are present in their

unavailability, and parents are continually becoming, in both these books, the new one as well,

the art lover, shadow presences, literally dead or remote or suicided.

And then their ghosts are multiplied in different ways.

Hal, most writers don't do this.

What is your impulse?

I'm very drawn to the mystery in my life and in life in general and in the things that can't be readily explained or readily understood.

And so to look at absence, which is one of the hardest things to understand,

and to approach loss by entering the loss and imagining it, and by confronting the remoteness in myself,

I'm able to investigate this through fiction and through, if not fiction, through writing.

...