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 reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm very happy to have as my guest today, Van de LaVita.

She's the author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

It's a book from Echo Press.

And she's the author as well of And Now You Can Go.

I found the new book really haunting and mysterious and funny.

And I thought it was original in a peculiar way.

I feel more and more that the conventional narrative of people's lives, that emotional

calamity drama that comes to regular climaxes has in a sense

run its course and that now all around us there are people who live life with a kind of emotional disconnect.

And I find about your heroines that while they're in a story of great emotional complexity and richness,

they have a sense of humor, but more than that, a kind of emotional disconnect

that makes their own experience mysterious to them.

And it seemed to me that both of these books are part of a process of examining a consciousness that doesn't go into hysteria or tragedy,

but has a kind of wary approach to what is emotionally happening.

It's as if the emotions are a little bit distanced,

not connected with in a direct way.

...