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 Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today we have what should be a very interesting show.

I have a writer, Robin Rom, whose book, The Mercy Papers, a memoir of three weeks, has recently been published by

Scribner's.

Now, as you know, we don't usually do memoirs on bookworm occasionally, but it's not a regular

thing.

But I had read Robin Rom's book of stories, The Mother Garden,

and found that the stories are often about the same subject as the memoir.

The subject of the memoir is a mother's death, not just a mother's death,

but a mother's death culminating nine years of dying.

And so your experience as a very young writer is this subject.

In fact, this is the subject you've been dealing with since you began to

publish. Am I right? Yes. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was 19, and I probably took my

first creative writing class. Well, I took my first creative writing class when I was little

because I went to a thing called Super Summer in Eugene, Oregon. But in terms of really writing

short stories, I was about the same age when I started to write. And so it has been this kind of

evolving subject for me for a long time.

...