Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

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

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Edmund White, whose new novel from Echo is Fanny of Fiction.

He's the author of many other novels and works of nonfiction, beginning with

forgetting Elena, followed by Nocturns for the King of Naples, a boy's own story,

Caracol, The Beautiful Room is Empty, Skinned Alive, the Farewell Symphony, the Married

Man. He's been a guest on Bookworm several times before.

And this seems to me to be one of your most interesting books in that it takes on subjects that are very hard for novelists to explore.

It takes on the subject of sexuality when sex is being downplayed, of writing when the writer is mediocre, of age when

the subject is past her heyday.

And so what we're dealing with here in every way is the flagging of inspiration and energy, which makes it a very moving and strangely human kind of book.

Perfection is not the goal here. This is a woman who's been trying to find a way to settle and survive in the face frequently of dire poverty.

She herself knows she narrates the book that she is not inspired, that perhaps she has a son,

Anthony Tromp, who will be.

But he at the end of the book has just put out the warden, so he's relatively at the beginning of his career.

Tell me why you chose this peculiar middle state to be writing about.

Well, I suppose partly because I'm facing aging myself, and I think every writer worries about flagging inspiration, though I must say I feel, I felt when I was writing this book that it was one of my more inspired ones for me, not for her, perhaps, but for me.

In that, I guess my direct model for this was a pale fire and a bogov's pale fire.

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