From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

The last time my guest, New Yorker writer Huachu was here, he was here to talk about his book, A Floating Chinaman, which took him 10 years to write.

His most recent book, stayed through a memoir, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, took him over 20.

Boy, you don't like to work, do you?

Wow, I had forgotten that the first one had taken me so long.

But, yeah, it's great to be here. I'll see you again in 40 years, I had forgotten it, but the first one had taken me so long. But yeah, it's great to be here. I'll

see you again in 40 years, I guess. Me or the AI that has replaced me. This copy I'm holding

in front of me I've had it for about a year now. And it's got so many underlined and passages and

dog-eared pages that it looks like a freshman's version of an American tragedy.

There's so much about you that you have caught me off guard in the book.

And one of the things was, early on, you've mentioned that my father's record collection only had the effect of making music seem uncool to me. It was something that

grown-ups took seriously. I was rendered speechless when I read that passage. Yeah, I guess,

you know, when I was a teenager, probably not that different from a lot of folks. I was just trying

to define myself in opposition to everyone, including my own parents.

And for whatever reason, I just didn't think there's any cachet attached to my parents being

like super into music. And so, I mean, what did I know? I was listening to a lot of like AM talk

shows at the time. So that was what I thought was cool.

It's so interesting because just thinking about these two books, there's kind of this, this built on this loneliness that kind of really is the line that runs through the both of them.

I mean, you can't see me, but my jaw just dropped.

I hadn't really thought about the two projects as having, really sharing anything in common

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