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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, for 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 I am taping at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival with one of my favorite writers.

She has been on the show several times for each of her last three books, and I was really devastated

when her new book came out and she was not traveling. But here she is at the book festival,

Alice McDermott, and we're going to talk about her newest novel, Child of My Heart.

I'm fascinated by the way in which you locate an angle of telling, but it is not there to make us

aware of the other things in the narrator's life, what's

happening in the kitchen, what's happening with her children. It is just there to give us

just this perspective on the material a summer years ago in which a visit occurred to a young girl who is taking care

of everyone and everything and taking care now of her visitor, Daisy. What made it essential for the book to be told many years later,

but in a time about which we know nothing? Well, it's, you know, the perspective that the narrator has.

This is a first-person narrator talking about a few days of her life when she was 15.

It's really, in many ways, a kind of artifact that it's a constructed story and and that

thematically was of primary importance to me that that this is a story that's that's

reconstructed that's shaped consciously by a storyteller who was the narrator. So it's a

recollection, but it's also something that she has manipulated in the telling. So certainly

that I needed that adult voice to reinterpret the events of these few days that this 15-year-old

experience.

Now, usually, when a writer does this, it's a cue that all sorts of warps and false mirrors

...