Hereby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Where we're living without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have Isabelle Allende with me.

I think we've become friends over the years, and her new book, the Japanese lover, I think,

is one of her best, all the way around, one of her best. I'm curious because it's a very

different book for you. Were you aware of its difference? Did you set about to write a different book? No, Michael. I don't

sit about to write anything. It just happens. It just happens. I sit down and things happen.

The characters walk into my life, the story unfolds, and I don't know where I'm going.

The seed for this book was a sentence that a friend of mine said,

walking in the streets of New York.

She said that we were talking about our mothers.

My mother is 95, and her mother is 80, and she was living in a nursing home,

in a retirement home.

And she said that her mother, who was living in a nursing home, in a retirement home. And she said that her mother,

...