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, Francine DuPlessy Gray, and she has written a memoir

of parents called Them, which is published by the Penguin Press.

Her parents were Alex and Tatiana Lieberman.

Alex was at his height, the head of the Kande Nast Empire.

Tatiana was famed in America as Tatiana of Sax, the designer of hats for women, which became de rigour for fashionable women.

But more extraordinarily, she was one of Miyakovsky's three muses.

They fled France during the occupation for America, for New York, with Francine.

And in a certain way, the book is a story in which Francine is trapped in a certain sense within

the story of Alex and Tatiana as an observer, as a

celebrant, but frequently without the loving encouragement and support of parents who get involved

in the day-to-day of a child's life.

So in a certain way, writing this book is almost an escape of sorts from that encasement.

Would you say so?

It's an escape from a repressed need to write about them.

I mean, it's an escape in the sense that I could not write about them until they had died,

which is a very painful feeling to have, thinking, someday I will write about them until they had died, which is a very painful feeling to have, thinking,

...