from PRX.

This is Studio 360. I'm Kurti Anderson.

I'm a longtime fan of Susan Choi. Her first novels I read were American woman about a fictionalized Patty Hurst

and a person of interest about a campus bombing, both of which were part of my reading prep

for writing my own novel about late 60s radicals. Her new novel, Just Out, is trust exercise.

About teenagers and trust and betrayal and the

blurry lines between fiction and real life.

I was eager to meet Susan Choi and talk with her about the new book, and when she got

to Studio 360, more delighted than dismayed, to learn that we'd already met on the phone 20

years ago when I was a New Yorker

writer and she was a New Yorker fact checker. And to learn that we'd lived a couple of blocks

apart in Brooklyn for a decade. So the conversation started right off with a pretty

neighborly vibe. So, Susan, the main characters in this novel are students at a performing arts high school in the South in the 1980s.

Why you attended the high school for the performing arts and visual arts in Houston in the 1980s.

So I'm assuming like these kids, you two were in the theater department?

I was in the theater department.

This feels like a real gotcha moment.

Yes, I did attend a theater arts program when I was in high school.

And was your experience being this theater student at this performing arts high school?

What was your feeling about it?

I loved going to a theater arts high school.

I begged my parents to let me go to this school. They wanted me to go to a traditional academic school where I could have, you know, taken all of the

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