Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintabird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

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

One of the things that I'm proudest of about Bookworm is that we have been speaking to my guest, Heidi Julevitz, since her very first book.

And our job is to discover the new things that are interesting.

And if they stay interesting, we talk about the later books.

And now we have the fourth novel by Heidi Julevitz called The Vanishers, and the subject matter, and we're going to

go deep, is mothers and daughters and mothers. And it's fascinating to me because this has

been the subject, not only of her previous book, the uses of enchantment, but as well in its way, parents and children, children and parents, the subject of her husband, Ben Marcus's most recent book, The Flame Alphabet, which you heard about just a few weeks ago on KCRW.

That's the first time I'd ever heard of that novel.

It came as a shock to me.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And now tell me, first of all, because I can't imagine proceeding without doing this, the relation to your own mother?

I have the most idyllic relationship with my own mother, which is to say, and I guess I should

clarify that pretty much nobody in my books has an idealic relationship with their own mother.

These relationships are pretty thorny, prickly.

...