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 Sloverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Mary Warrenov,

whose most recent novel, Niagara, has been published as a paperback original by Serpentzell Press.

Also recently published as a special edition is a chapbook called Eyewitness to Warhol.

It's published by Victoria Daily publisher.

And it's very interesting to have these books side by side because

Mary Warnoff began as a Warhol actress, a superstar, most famous for her role of

Hanoi Hanna in Chelsea Girls, but she was in Hedy as well. She's written three fiction works, Swimming Underground,

My Years in the Warhol Factory, Snake, and now Niagara.

You know, what I notice in both of these books is that the persona is burning away,

that the tone, for instance, of swimming underground, which is very

much the Hanna-i-Hanna persona, the dominatrix, is going underground, and we're hearing

really the voice of a writer who's not interested in projecting an attitude. Was that difficult and was it scary

to let go of what was, after all, a kind of signature self-presentation? I think that I projected

the attitude more in swimming underground because that is how I felt. I was all attitude at that time of my life.

And I wanted to give people a feeling of what it was like.

I mean, I don't do much describing about what it was like,

but I put myself in that younger mind.

The other book, I Witness to Warhol, is not about attitude. It's actually

...