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 Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm here today with Lynn Tillman, the author most recently of motion sickness, recently published by the Poseidon Press, author as well of haunted houses, and recently in paperback,

her earlier and shorter pieces have been collected by Serpent's

Tail Press in a book called Absence Makes the Heart.

I'm going to begin by trying to describe Lim Tillman, and after I fail, she'll correct

me.

It seems to me that in no other work that I know is the postmodern condition, as described by literary criticism, applied to daily life, so that your characters wander in a world that is truly postmodern and can only be understood by dimly understood postmodernist thinking.

Is this in any way applicable?

Dimly postmodernist thinking?

Yes, I think it is applicable.

I think I place my characters in a certain kind of jeopardy,

and there's always a questioning of identity and identity in relation to their own histories,

and then the larger history out of which they've been formed and propelled in a sense.

Well, in motion sickness, for instance, it seems to me that the characters are trying to get through a world

that perhaps other writers would describe as being susceptible to information overload

or used to be entropy.

At any rate, something has become overwhelming and wrong.

It cannot be understood.

And these characters sort of wander in the midspace between Freud and Le Cohn.

And what's more, they may or may not understand

Lecon or Freud, but in other words, the tools may not even be adequate to the task of understanding

...