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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

Today I'm really happy to have us my guest, Marisha Pessel, whose first novel special topics

in Calamity Physics has just been published by Viking. The book has gotten a huge amount of attention.

It's, you know, the striking debut first novel of the year.

And what intrigues me about it is that it has the courage to be a straightforwardly literary book. It's narrated by a young woman

at Harvard named Blue Van Meer. Her mother died when she was five. Her father, we suspect, discover, has abandoned her. And in some sense, she's writing

the book, she finds herself in a lecture hall writing the word goodbye up and down the margins.

She's writing the book as a kind of bridge to her past in a sense? Yes, absolutely. And that's, I think,

informed by, because she's lived so much of her life as she goes on to eventually write down her

story, but she's lived so much of her life, not with peers, but really traveling with her father

and reading voraciously in her Volvo station wagon as they traveled across America.

So that is informed.

Her desire to tell the story is something that is part of those old classic books we read,

those Victorian novels where someone had an incredible story to tell

and a weight on their shoulders that they could only lift by telling this story.

Wuthering Heights comes to mind in terms of using that as a structure.

So she very much is aware of that when she decides to write her story once and for all.

...