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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

Hello and welcome to bookworm.

Today my guest is Sue Miller, the author most recently of While I Was Gone,

which is published by Knopf.

She's the author as well in order of The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbot, a book of

stories, family pictures for love, the distinguished guest, and now while I was gone, my guest,

Sue Miller.

I wanted to ask you, there are many areas in here that seem to make possible the revelations that occur in this book.

And among them is to have a narrator who is a veterinarian and her husband who was a minister. And it began to feel as if that joining point of religion and science was a necessary

precondition to the story you were telling?

I certainly thought of it.

I thought of it also in terms of there's another character in the book, a man with whom the

narrator becomes interested in, who is a scientist too.

And I thought of, there were several sort of takes I had on that.

I did very much want a sort of separate perspectives, different perspectives,

on the sense of self, on the sense of, you know, what a person is, what the soul is,

as offered by, more implicitly by religion, because Daniel,

the husband, who is the minister, never gives a definition or offers his explanation

of his faith.

But Eli, the scientist, does offer a sort of explanation of, you know, why we are the

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