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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good to bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is

Tatjana Soli, and it's a remarkable story. Her novel is called The Lotus Eaders. It's a first novel. Unlike

most first novels, it was reviewed on the front cover of the New York Times book review, and

later selected as one of the hundred most important books of the year. And more than that, it appeared on the 35th anniversary of the

fall of Saigon, a novel about Vietnam, about women in Vietnam, in particular a woman in

Vietnam. And tell me, why Vietnam?

It's been kind of an obsession for me my whole life. My mom was an interpreter in Naples, Italy, for NATO.

And when she came to the, she had an offer to come to the U.S. for both of us to become citizens.

And we were sponsored, and she got a job at Ford Ord military base in Monterey, California.

So I spent two years in the late 60s when I was a little girl living on the military base.

And I think that's the only clue that I have that it became such an important part to me that when I grew up, I joke that I was a Vietnam groupie, that I read everything.

And I was fascinated by that time,

and I just wanted to understand some of the experiences that I'd had.

I never thought that I would write about it, but it was something that was deep inside me.

I was in kindergarten, and I had, you know, my playmates, their fathers would be shipped off,

and just the trauma of seeing the families disrupted.

Of course, some of their fathers didn't come home and then, you know, the families would disappear a couple days later.

...