Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

On KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblant, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have, as my guest, Lori Moore, whose new book, a novel,

A Gate at the Stairs, has been published by Knopf.

I found it to be a very beautiful and lovely novel, but by the end, perhaps I wouldn't have known

because I was weeping so much.

It was a book that truly took me out of a certain kind of emotional complacency

that I feel characterizes our times into a realm of feeling that I'm grateful for, that I'm unaccustomed to finding in a book.

And it seems to me that since, in most of your early work, that kind of SaaS characters who've got a kind of mouth on them, are a specialty. This seems to be a

whole new tone in your work. Well, it's been 11 years in the writing. That could explain some things.

I think I've always sort of been working a mixed palette of, you know, the comic and the tragic

and trying to sort of scoop it all up and spread it on the canvas.

So to some extent, I don't necessarily feel that it's new. I do feel what's new is the long narrative in one sensibility, the 300 pages of living inside one person's head. That's

something I've never done before. What was it like? It was very exciting on some days, and it was

very almost demented in that I felt that I had this person I reported into at my desk, and I was very close to her, and I wanted to be with her and be with all the things that she was doing.

Of course, there were things that I was forcing her to do.

But so I was reluctant to let her go in a way.

I felt very close to this narrator.

...