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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.

Hi, this is Mike Silverblada, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Mary Carr,

the author of The Liar's Club,

a memoir recently published by Viking.

She's the author as well of two books of poetry,

The Devil's Tour,

published by New Directionsctions and Abacus.

This book seems like such an eruption, and I remember that, well, an eruption of voice, you know, and declared emotional terror.

I've read that you've wrote it three times as a novel before it became a memoir.

What was the shift?

And do you find traces of the novel still in it?

And does that mean a difference in the quality of truth-telling?

Complicated question. No, it's a great question.

It was only, I tried to write it once as a novel, but that's not important. I mean, what I found

that I think, I'm not a real, I don't know much about novels, which would make me ill-equipped

to write one. I'm surprised now that people think, because I written a book of prose that I would be any better, you know, prepared to write a novel, which seems to me like an art form, that you have to study the way you study a sonnet or something.

...