From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

The writer Laura Jacobs has a real interest in the social order, not only just the order itself,

but her character's relationship to it.

You can see that in her work as a critic.

She writes about dance and fashion for Vanity Fares as a contributing editor.

She also wrote the book, Women About Town.

Her new delicious novel is, of course, The Birdcatcher.

Laura, thanks for coming back.

Thank you for having me.

One of the things that I think separates this

from women who work, your first novel,

is that there's not that sense of the omniscient narrator so much.

I mean, it feels really momentary,

like she's experiencing things as they're happening.

Also, sometimes thoughts are flooding to her,

and one thing triggers something else,

trigger something else.

It's a very different kind of tone and in prose style to use, and I wonder where that came from for you.

I really wanted to focus on this one character, and I felt that I had learned a lot about writing a novel, doing that first novel. And I wanted to push my technique further and get deeper into an imagination and a voice. And so I really decided that it was going to be

Margaret's voice. And when you're in the head of one person, you have to move with it.

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