You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and my guest today is Ian Frazier, the author most recently

of Family, published by Faris Strauss and Giroux, the author as well of Great Plains,

a book of essays, Nobody Better Than Nobody, and a book of occasional pieces called Dating Your Mom.

I guess one of the things that first touched me about family, which is a memoir of your parents' life in Ohio and Indiana and their ancestors as well, was the desire the book seems to have to be handmade.

There, you know, you have your own pictures and photostats of your notes and a picture of the cathedral you drew and the family tree in the book is in your own handwriting.

And I wanted to ask you a question that would touch on the personal feeling of the book as such.

Well, I wanted to...

One of the ideas that I had of doing the book was to show that anybody can do this.

You can do your own genealogy.

It's not that tough.

But you can also understand things that maybe you would otherwise put off to the better expertise of someone else.

And what is great about the nonfiction form is that so many different kinds of writing are

included in it.

And what I wanted to do was first find my way through different kinds of texts, histories, scientific

texts sometimes were appropriate, personal memoirs, letters, and to take from all of these

in a way that I think is accurately described as handmade,

to sort of stitch together as if I were making a quilt,

...