Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. Boots! Where would we be without books? Where would we be without good? No, into the bird. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm excited and honored to have as my guest, Sapphire, the author most recently of The Kid published by The Penguin Press.

Well, you all know her as the author of Push, which became the movie Precious.

She's the author as well of two books of poetry, Black Wings and Blind Angels, as well as American Dreams.

And I want to begin by saying that unlike most of you,

I hadn't read Push. It's the real thing. The real thing moves you and hurts you and loves you

and doesn't let you go and you think about it all the time.

And I call it my friends and I said, oh, I just read Sapphire's book, Push.

It's the real thing.

And they go, you're kidding because, you know, people get the real thing crammed down their throat all the time.

And when it's the false thing, you grow resentful.

I said, no, no, this really is real.

It's a controversial book.

A controversy has to have two sides, and I'm on the side of the controversy that says that this book will be being read 100 years from now, and so will the kid, which is an extraordinary work of literature.

It's twice the length of push.

It took Sapphire 10 years to write it, and it got written, how?

It got written bit by bit. I started on it. I keep a notebook. So my earliest notes when I was looking back were the late 90s. When I signed the contract for the book Push, I was working

with Random House, and we had a two-book contract,

and the second book was for a book of poetry. And that became Black Wings and Blind Angels. And so

that came out in 99, 2000. And then I got back to the kid. It had a different title then.

The kid was the last of many working titles that I had.

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