L.A. has the largest jail system in the country.

You got people that been in jail just like one time and their life can't get nothing because of whatever mistake they made.

I stole some ground turkey because I wanted to feed my family. We was hungry.

Off the Block. Stories tracing the path from city block to cell block and back.

Find it now at kCRW.com or subscribe on iTunes.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Well, are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. Boots.

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tender.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

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

Today I feel like the show is having a grandchild.

My guest is not just Spiegelman. Both of her parents, Art Spiegelman and

Francois Moly, have been guests on Bookworm. And this book, I'm supposed to protect you from

all this, is a memoir. And as you all know, generally, I don't talk about memoirs on bookworm.

But I thought that this book was something beyond the facts of memory and had entered

into, for lack of a less pretentious term, the metaphysics of truth.

Is that okay, Natchah?

I love that, yes.

Okay.

And I discovered that there was an addition a epigraph from one of my favorite writers, poets, thinkers.

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