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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Carolyn C.

She's the author most recently of The Handyman, published by Random House.

Her previous novels include Making History, Golden Days, and Ryan Maidens.

Her last book was a biographical book, a memoir called Dreaming.

Dreaming and Golden Days are available in paperback by the University of California Press,

and The Handyman, the new novel, is, as I said, from Random House.

Now, having just published a pair of Apocalypse novels, this, as far as I can tell, is the most

optimistic thing that you've done. Was it your decision to write a book that would be able to

make a more straightforward affirmation of life than the ones previously?

Well, I guess so. I don't know. I think it's very hard for me to get disaster out of my system.

And of course, there is an almost disaster in the handyman in chapter two but nobody

dies for a change and it seems to me that there are a lot of potentially terrible and sad

situations in the handyman but that they are in essence fixman, but that they are, in essence, fixable, and the handyman, in essence, is able to fix them.

So I think I'm just trying to look at the world, I don't know, sort of with this kind of common sense, like what if everybody went to community college

and painted their bedrooms and studied Spanish? Wouldn't this be a better place? You know, I mean,

...