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?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Melanie Rayton.

She's the author of a novel published by Houghton Mifflin.

It's called Sweethearts.

She was our guest when her book of short stories' first body came out, and it's been with enormous interest in enthusiasm

that I've read her earlier books and waited for Sweethearts to appear. I'd been reading sections of it in literary magazines,

and I waited for the book because I didn't know

exactly what its tone would be from its pieces.

And the book ultimately is narrated by a very unusual character.

Her name is Marie Zimmer, and I wanted to begin by asking Melanie Raytonne to talk about her.

Marie has been deaf since the age of nine, and her mother drowned when she was 11, and she's lived with her father

ever since that time. Most of that time, she's lived alone with her father on a secluded beach

in Montana on Flathead Lake, which is a lake that's almost 30 miles long and at some points

more than 10 miles wide.

She is not only deaf, but at a certain point around a third of the way into the book,

we learn that she's encephalytic and then a bit further that she is epileptic.

And although epilepsy is, as is said in the book, a common

side effect of her first disease, it begins to feel as if we're witnessing in the narrator

...