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 read from KCRW Santa Monica I'm

Michael Silverblatt and this is bookworm today I'm honored to have as my guest

Gorvidal whose volume of memoir the second volume after palimpsest point-to-point

navigation has just been published by Doubleday.

One of the things that fascinated me in the volume is that it seems as if, in preparation for doing this one,

you looked at a number of writers' memoirs from Udora Welty's, one, writer's beginnings, the Tennessee

Williams' letters, Paul Bolz's without stopping, and I wondered what it was you found

about writers' memoirs.

What did I not find?

Well, I did that just, you know, as a guide for myself, as the first volume, Palim says,

was my first 40 years, and point-to-point navigation is my last 40 years.

And as luck would have it, or fate would have it, or as time would have it,

I am now at a point in which practically everybody I know has published a memoir,

volumes of letters by Tennessee, two Tennessee,, Paul Bowles, me, have all come out, and I have such a wealth of material.

I never kept notebooks.

I have vague memories.

I have a good oral memory, which means I can remember conversations at times, but not terribly accurately.

And then suddenly I realized all I had to do was pick up this wonderful volume of Tennessee's

...