Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, 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. Today I'm very pleased.

I have a great writer across from me at the table. It's James McCourt. His newest book is an anatomy

of nostalgia called Lasting City. And I think that he's one of the great living writers of our time.

And for that reason, I was particularly eager to talk to him about this extraordinary

high wire act in which a young boy grows to be a 70-year-old man.

He is at his mother's deathbed, and his mother says,

tell everything, tell it all.

Now, you know, we think we know what tell everything means.

You know, the usual stories.

But James McCord is a literalist.

So what does tell everything mean?

It's the complicated story of a marriage which was bumpy and three boys who were raised in it, a father who becomes impoverished when his bank closes in the 30s, has a nervous breakdown,

the mother is forced to go to work, and she goes to work for a furrier called L.B. Farias

down in the Farad District, and she's a traveling saleswoman because rich women always bought furs.

And she had a partner.

And along the way, they had an affair.

I didn't find out about it until years later when a woman called me and said,

...