Hereby Monsters is a show that invites you to explore fear and the unknown.

I saw her face change.

I saw her see where I'd pulled my hair out.

Psychological warfare was always considered kind of an oddity, something done by freaks.

On the count of three, we're literally going to step out of our body.

Step out.

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Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good? No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt,

and this is Bookworm. Today, my guest is Michelle Latiole. Her book is called She. It's published by

W. W. W. Norton, and it's not a book of short stories, and it's not a novel.

It's called on its cover, fiction. And I would say that that ascription is as vague as the title. Now, it's my theory that the title, She, is meant to refer to all of the women in the

book, that they represent a spectrum of women. That spectrum begins with a 15-year-old runaway child who's come to Los Angeles. It goes through a

whole arc of different kinds of possibilities for women and ends with an ideal match. A botanist who, like most of the people in the book, she doesn't get to use her skills and her deepest interests.

She is the designer of extraordinarily realistic sugar flowers for wedding cakes and births and, you know, they're,

she is the reason why these cakes have become famous, but she does her work anonymously.

The baker has become famous. The woman is living in a kind of anonymity. Okay. Would you put this in the terms in which

you were thinking about what she meant in this book? No, I mean, I think you're, you know, absolutely it is a range of she's.

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