Hearby 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.

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

No, Tzuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

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

Today my guest is Doty Bellamy.

She has done a collection of her, well, I don't know what to call them.

Officially they're being called essays.

And if I were being asked to nominate one essay I've read this year for a special award,

it would be Doty Bellamy's essay Phone Home.

It's about her mother's death done by way of an analysis of E.T.

As it happens, Doty and her mother watch E.T.

When the mother is dying, an extraordinary spike of memory leads you to recall that you watched

it when your grandmother was dying too. E.T. becomes in the essay like an angel of death to enunciate the loss of a loved one.

And the whole piece blooms into this marriage of analysis, essay, personal memoir, poem,

and that defines what the pieces are like in this new book called

When the Sick Rule the World, which is published by Seemia Text. What do you consider these? Are they

essays? Are they meditations? Do you have? Well, I know what you're

...