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 Michael Silverblatt. Welcome to Bookworm.

We are here in the studio today with Mary Morris, who will be our first guest.

Her new novel, The Waiting Room, has appeared in hardcover from Doubleday.

And we will be talking during our second segment with Michael Goth, the owner of Phoenix bookstore in

Santa Monica. Mary Morris was a writer who I'd read, I'd read Vanishing Animals and the Bus of Dreams,

and she appeared at Beyond Baroque to support Alice McDermott, who'd come down to give a reading.

And I said, oh, Mary Mary Morris, I've read your books.

And she was teaching that semester last year at USC.

And we kind of became friends, a difficult friendship, because it involved the fact that the bookworm doesn't drive.

The Morris has a baby daughter.

They were living in Orange County, I in Hollywood, and a lot of flummery went on before we finally spent a kind of picnic day at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Now, I did not

propose that we spend the day at Forest Lawn. However, you know, normal it might seem to the

listeners that I would propose such a thing. It was Mary Morris. What made you want to come out

to Forest Lawn? In fact,

I think it was your second time there. Yeah, it was my second time at Forest Lawn. You know,

I'm not exactly sure. I began doing research, Michael, on a book about California, and I wasn't

really sure exactly where the research would take me. But I started getting interested in the whole

facsimile aspect of life out here, the fact that, for example, at medieval times restaurant, it's like a, you know, I don't know if any of you've ever been to medieval times, but it's sort of like a jousting pit and you have dinner while wenches serve you. You know, Disneyland, I was sort of interested in the whole notion of theme park in American culture and what it really, I mean, what it says about the American dream, what it says about America and Forest Lawn with its replicas of the baptistry doors and other things just sort of fit into that.

It was kind of funny because reading the waiting room, your new novel, I found myself lifting up one finger to scold.

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