Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. There's a moment that happens on the

playground pretty often where you're talking to a fellow parent and one of your kids starts to do

something, not dangerous per se, but is on the way towards dangerous. And then you have to

table your discussion and have a quick side chat about, um, should we stop this? I don't know. It's good for them to explore, ah, but they might get hurt.

Oh, but if I step in, they might never become a confident adult, you know, that sort of thing.

That balance of parenting is what author Honor Jones is exploring in her new novel, Sleep.

Up ahead, she talks to NPR's and Mary Louise Kelly about

writing a book full of second-guessing and lowering expectations. That's coming up.

Is it possible to have a childhood that is both picture-perfect and perfectly awful? And if so,

how much of the baggage will you end up carrying 20 plus years later when you

have children of your own? Honored Jones explores these questions in a quietly, profoundly

beautiful new novel titled Sleep. Honor Jones, hi. Hi. Hi. I'm going to let you take the lead here

on how much to give away of the secrets in your protagonist Margaret's past. So you paint us a picture of how I just described it. This picture perfect, but also perfectly awful childhood. Tell me about it.

Yeah. So she grows up. She has this kind of wonderful best friend who

also follows her through life. And, you know, she has a family and a brother, and she's growing up in

sort of this verdant suburban world. But something happens that's really disorienting and she

isn't protected. So she sort of has to grow up protecting

herself. And she's very watchful and like perceptive as a child, but I think becomes more so

for practical reasons. So she turns into, as a mother, someone very concerned with the question

of how you, you know, raise children to be safe without raising them to be afraid and, like, what the right level of vigilance is, which is, I think, something that all parents worry about.

Yeah.

All right. You said something happened, and she is not protected. So I have to ask you about, to me, the other central character in this novel,

...