Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

Today I'm really happy to have us my guest, Gary Steingard.

His new book is Super Sad True Love Story. It's published by Random House. And, you know, it is a book. They call them now, there are utopias. Well, there are also dystopias. 1984 is a dystopia. And this is a dystopian American novel, but it's a mixture which asks,

you know, can an old-fashioned love story essentially still be told in an American dystopia?

Can Lenny, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who reads books, and Eunice, who's much younger,

she's a daughter of Korean immigrants, and she reads only to shop online, can they find love

in the nightmarish American science fiction of the near future?

Do I have this sort of right?

I think that's right. I think that's exactly right.

There's a kind of unhappy, pessimistic Ashkenazi Soviet Jew like myself who wants to tell a tale of woe and of a collapse of a country and an empire.

And then there's the old-fashioned romantic who wants it wedded to a romantic story. You know, I always put my characters through hell. Life always folds in around them. But I think this is the first time where I actually began to love my own characters. And I think, you know, wanted them to love each other very much, despite all the odds, which is a very traditional kind of love story. You know, what does it take to love a character, first of all? It's very hard to love a character, I think, because a lot of us are trained to be writers, you know, and as writers, what's most important is the higher good so that people can theorize about what you write and try to pick it apart and look for different kinds of motifs and things like that. But when you fall in love with the character, you get really carried away, almost as if you like somebody and you met them for the first time, and you talk and talk and talk and talk. And I think that's a very similar thing when you actually fall in love with your characters. And that's why I allowed both of them to really open their mouths and to, you know, go on for prodigious amounts of pages without any kind of filter.

Now, this book, Super Sad True Love Story, has two narrators, the two lovers, one of whom,

more old-fashioned is writing in a diary, the other of whom, newfangled, is writing to her machines.

Yes.

And they speak the language appropriate, on the one hand, to diaries, on the other hand, to web speak.

...