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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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Susan Minut.

She's the author most recently of Evening.

Her other books are monkeys, lust and other stories, and folly.

And she has come to speak to me here at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair, where we're

recording on site.

So we're dealing with the circumambient sound, not of the studio and not of the purity.

We're used to on Bookworm.

Susan, welcome.

I wanted to begin by asking you the quality of Shiascuro and memory wants that goes throughout

this novel evening is rather remarkable and stylistically it seems

to have been, at least to my eye, immensely difficult to achieve. I wonder how it evolved

that style. Well, like, the process the book took about five years to write, though it was interrupted in the middle.

I was doing some movie work.

And it started out, you know, every book has its own evolution.

It started out actually as a novella that was focusing on the relationship

of the protagonist with her nurse as she's dying. And it was originally titled Report from Nurse

Brown. What remains of that bit of the novella is about, I think, three pages out of the whole, yeah, out of the whole book.

Because what happened is I started to become more interested in, I was interested in the relationship that went on between this woman as she's dying and maybe this last relationship she forms,

...