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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

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.

I'm very happy to say that our guest today is Sarah Manguso.

She is the author of, well, quite a few books,

two books of poetry, four or five books of essay and memoir,

and now she has written her first novel called Very Cold People. It's published by Hogarth Press, and I'm

very happy to say that I like her work very much. I take it seriously. It's very moving work. Much of the work you hear about on Bookworm is often prey to satire

or sarcasm or elaborate structural constraints, but you write very direct explorations of what it means to be human.

First, let me just thank you for having me as a guest.

Well, I often think about how I became the person I seem to be now, and I think I haven't really functionally changed since I was about 11, and I realized that the things that I wanted to do were to write about my feelings and sing in choirs.

And I really have just continued doing that, although my books appear in various forms, poetry, prose,

essay, memoir, short, long, truncated, fragmented, but really the entire project is just, I guess,

what would maybe condescendingly be described as processing or therapeutic release or, you know, all the other words that are used to describe women's writing in a way that makes it something other

than literature. But something else that I have to say is that when men read my work, and

particularly my book ongoingness, which is, you know, I think it's the most female of my books,

it's about motherhood, It has breast milk in it.

When a man declares that that's a piece of serious literature, I realize that I'm in the presence of somebody who is taking me seriously as a writer.

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