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.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Veronica Gonzalez.

It's one of our fairly rare first novels.

She's written a novel called Twin Time, or How Death Befell Me,

which is published by Semiotext Press. And I found it fascinating because in a certain way,

it's a novel that almost, almost can't be written. I'll tell you why. The heroine's

name is Mona. She grows up in Mount Washington, Los Angeles, believing that the man who is

her is her father, that her mother died in childbirth, and she does not know

that the man raising her is not her father, that her mother did not die, and that when she left,

she took a twin brother with her. And so this is a character who knows nothing about the factual nature of her existence.

And in fact, the reader knows more than she does.

Now, this seems to be a book that becomes, therefore, very hard to narrate.

Tell me about how you did it.

Well, I began the book.

I wrote the middle section of the book first, which once you read the book seems kind of crazy because I felt that I needed to give, I needed to give Mona this background, which was her mother.

And as I wrote, as I was writing Mona, I wasn't quite sure what that background was myself, her mother's

background, what was going to be the impetus for this quest. But I love the idea of ambiguity

...