You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

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

Hi, welcome to Bookworm.

We're here today in the studio with Judith Freeman, the author of the Chinchilla Farm, recently

published by Norton.

You know, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I read a review in the Publishers Weekly that

said that this novel under review was a standard Los Angeles novel

with its cast of obligatory crazies and flakes. And so when I picked up the Chinchilla Farm,

I thought with pleasure, well, the heroine's name is Verna Flake. Maybe this will be an obligatory

Los Angeles novel. Not only is it a

Los Angeles novel, in many ways, it's a very good novel. When you chose to name her Flake,

what was that about? Well, it's because her great-grandfather, who was a Mormon polygamist, settled a town in Arizona called Snowflake.

And the town was named after the grandfather, Flake, and also an apostle of the church, whose name was Snow.

So the name came from that incident.

It is funny because they do say back there in the east

that flakes are all we put into our novels.

What's beautiful about this book, The Chinchilla Farm, is that although these people

are in many ways flakes and are kind of curving their own destinies, they're not treated

as figures of mockery. They're given a great gravity and tenderness toward one another. But the heroin in

particular has a tendency to pick up rather asocial types and find herself dragging them with

...