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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.

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

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Francine Prose.

We've been speaking to Francine fairly regularly on Bookworm, but we haven't spoken about her last two or maybe even

three books. Her newest book is a book, a novel, called Golden Grove. It's published by Harper,

and it's narrated by a 13-year-old young woman whose older sister has died, and it's going to be the occasion

for her learning about death and mourning and what it does and what it doesn't do.

Now, Francine's last book was a book called Reading Like a Writer.

It was very successful and very popular, and as I was going through it,

I discovered a sentence that she had written about growing up with a short story by Catherine Mansfield

and realizing ultimately that the characters in that

book were suffering from the astonishment and bewilderment that all of us, regardless of

how grown up or sophisticated we imagine ourselves to be, feel in the face of the shocking

finality, the absence, the mystery of death.

What began this book? You mentioned in reading like a writer that it was a death in your family

that brought you to understand better, the Catherine Mansfield story. What led you to write a book about, largely

about death and mourning? Well, you know, this book started in the strangest way. Michael,

I mean, everyone starts in a strange way, and each book starts differently from the one before,

...