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, this is Michael Silverblatt.

Welcome to Bookworm.

My guest in the studio is Ken Simon, author of Pizza Face, or The Hero of Suburbia, recently

published by Grove Weidenfeld.

Good part of my enjoyment of this book came from my enjoyment of a certain kind of book

that I read when I was growing up. Some of them were by Beverly Cleary. Some of them were by

Max Schoeman, like The Adventures of Dobie Gillis. And this struck me as being a kind of astonishing novel for geeks. What was, you know, what were your

examples in constructing this amazing adolescent Andy with his case of terminal acne and his fear of

everything? Michael, I had no examples and I had no influences. Growing up, I didn't read much.

In high school, we weren't encouraged to read books. We were encouraged to memorize vocabulary

words for the SATs. When we were given books in the rare instances that we were given books to read,

we weren't told to write about them or

discuss them, we were told to create art projects for them. In other words, it would be read

Huckleberry Finn and then make a poster or create a skit about Huckleberry Finn. So since I wasn't

artistic in the sense of drawing or making poster board, I always thought I had no aptitude in literature.

So growing up by artistic influences and more television, I watched Saturday Night Live

and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, I haven't started, didn't start reading until I moved to New York

like five years ago, so I have a lot of writing to catch up on.

...