Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can can reason who can read

from KCRW Santa Monica I'm Michael

sulfur blatt and this is bookworm today

Susan Laurie Parks is here to talk about her first novel

Getting Mother's Body which has just come into paperback

from Random House.

Is it in fact your first novel or just...

Well, it's my first published novel, let's say that.

Yeah, I think I was writing a novel when I was in fourth grade, but that hasn't come out.

That won't come out.

Tell me, where were you born?

I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Yeah, my father was in the Army, and I was born.

And shortly after I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1963, we moved.

We're a traveling family, my family.

So we got on the road shortly after I was born and drove to North Carolina, started

living there. Because this book has a real on the road quality that seems to capture voices

from place to place. Is its model Faulkner? Its model is Faulkner, and its model is also, like I said,

...