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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Margo Lipsy.

She is the author most recently of The Missing World

and previously of criminals, homework, and the short story collection

learning by heart. The missing world is published by Alfred Knopf. The three previous books

are available as Penguin Paperbacks. Now, well, I wanted to begin immediately. In your very first book, you have a story

obituary, which might very well be a signature story. It's a young girl speaking about her father's

appetite for funerals and the appurtenances of death and the effect of those

appetites on her. How is it that your books have emerged with this especially creepy tone?

It's very astute of you, Michael, to pick obituary, because I think in many ways it remains my favorite thing that I've written.

I was always fascinated by obituaries in the British newspapers and by the effort in those obituaries to sum up a life, to sum up a person, I suppose. And I think they were especially

meaningful to me because throughout my childhood, so many people around me died. My mother died

when I was two and a half. My beloved great-a-a-a-a-half, when I was nine or ten, and a number of other relatives died,

and my father died when I was 22.

So obituaries were a rather common currency in my early life.

My goodness.

Then these books then, how do you describe their tone? Because they are somewhere

between comic and grizzly. I tend to call them queasy, but I'm not sure that I'm putting my finger on what they are for the author

as she writes them.

...