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 my guest is Heidi Julevitz.

She's the author of The Novel, The Effect of Living Backwards.

It's published by Putnam.

Her first novel, The Mineral Palace, attracted my attention

when it came out a couple of years ago, and we had her on the show for her very first book.

That book was a book of really extraordinarily dark and gruesome sensibility. This one

is not less gruesome, but it has the key signature

of a nonsense novel over it. Its title comes from a famous dialogue in Alice in Wonderland

that you are in a terribly difficult situation if you can have strawberry jam tomorrow

because essentially tomorrow never comes and you have to run very fast to prevent yourself

from moving backwards.

And I think it's the red queen, isn't it, who talks about it?

Or is it the white queen?

It's one of those queens. It's one of those queens. Yes. It's not the red queen, isn't it, who talks about it? Or is it the white queen? It's one of those queens.

It's one of those queens.

Yes.

...