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?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

My guest today is Sue Miller, author of Family Pictures, recently published by Harper and Roe.

She's the author, too, of The Good Mother, as well as a collection of short stories called Inventing the Abbotts. I was wondering, I thought I'd start out on the difficult issue for me.

I sometimes look at family novels as a penance for my sins.

I have to whip myself to get my way through a generational novel.

And I found myself talking to friends about your book in particular and saying, you know,

once I've finished, I'm very happy to have read them. And I think it is a kind of male evasion

that the man does not want to hear in life or in fiction the intimate story of the family and the notation

of the female eye as the family is being raised. And yet it's only the woman who can write such a novel.

I remember feeling this when I read Mary Gordon's book, too, also a wonderful novel,

very impressive, but I found myself having to drag myself to the book and then afterwards saying,

why is it so difficult? Do you find that to be the case? Is there?

You mean, do other men ask me that or say that? Or do other men...

No one.

What do you do about...

Well, someone like Larry Wojewty.

What do you do about Tolstoy?

Well, you know, Tolstoy, though, is writing the history of the serfs, of the revolution.

...