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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

I have a very special guest today.

I'm very pleased to have William Steyer in the studio.

He came through to do a reading at the Met Theater,

whose extraordinary series of readings with writers

as well as with actors reading the works of great writers and

contemporary writers is ongoing and directed by Darrell Larson. It's a terrific series, and I took

the occasion of his being here to begin a conversation about, well, we'll see, but we'll start with Darkness Visible,

his most recent book, A Memoir of Madness.

He's the author, I Hardly Need Say, of Sophie's Choice and of the Confessions of Nat Turner,

Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, as well as this quiet dust, a book of essays.

In the clap shack, a plate.

I wanted to start by asking you, there was something that startled me enormously in darkness visible.

You say that when writing first about depression for the op-ed page of the New York Times,

you were violating a privacy that you felt that you'd never violated before. Now, many writers would feel

that that is the very nature of writing

and an ongoing violation of privacy,

and I was surprised by that sentence.

...