Author: Scarlett Thomas

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Recovering from Scarlett fever.

Subjects Discussed: Prodigious fiction authors, pursuing the novel of ideas, Neuromancer, moving away from families to loner characters, striving for authenticity in a middle-class literary culture, smart women characters and sex, breaking rules, codebreaking, academic environments in novels, plots dictated by ideas, the importance of preplanning a novel in a notebook, the relationship between teaching and writing, the difference between a reader and a reading audience, the dangers of information processing, Derrida, relative narrative vs. the Jungian collective unconscious, devising the troposphere, the mashing up of literary and genre, Arturo Perez-Reverte, the question of whether genre is superior or inferior, formulaic plots, narrative ambiguity in the novel of ideas, responding to Mark Sarvas’s narrative quibble about The End of Mr. Y, and the New Puritans.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Thomas: The family in the Lily Pascale novels was very much a combination of a fantasy and a lie. I mean, I’ve had quite — I guess everybody’s had a strange crazy life in some ways. But for me, I knew when I was a teenager that I didn’t want to have children for myself. I didn’t have a cozy, middle-class upbringing at all. My life was really very complex growing up. And when I decided I was going to write, I almost made this weird decision at the very beginning of my career that I was going to write as a kind of mask. I was going to do something completely different from what I try to do know. I mean, now, authenticity is very, very important to me. At the time, I felt like writing was kind of a game, a construction. And I don’t know why I created such a nauseating bourgeois family back then. I think partly, I wanted to come from that. Because then my life would make a more usual kind of sense.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Procrastinating at the last minute.

Guests: Carolyn Kellogg and Alan DeNiro

Subjects Discussed: Small Beer Press, genres, Jim Monroe, on being a post-science fiction author, picking from years of fabulism, on being a genre agnostic, weaving between genres, literary fiction, creepiness, letter-writing action, wordplay, Dungeons & Dragons, absurdity, contemporary income disparities, dread, footnotes in fiction, jolts of emotion, reversing polarity between poetry and fiction, the rust belt, and the loneliness of Wal-Mart.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

DeNiro: I’ve always kind of considered myself science-fiction influenced. Or another way I’ve kind of thought of it as — and I don’t know if adding “post-” anything is really vain or pretentious or whatever — but almost kind of a post-science fiction, of kind of looking at the whole field of hundreds of years of fantastic literature and definitely being within that larger tradition of fabulism and the like.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Remarkably terse.

Author: A.M. Homes

Subjects Discussed: Expanding the New Yorker piece to book form, the rules of memoir, inventing deposition testimony, being “dished up” by the Roiphe sisters, the false connection between Homes’ novels and the memoir, Joan Didion, the culture of confessional memoirs, truth stranger than truth, speculating upon parents, being fact-checked by The New Yorker, negotiating with Granta and The New Yorker, declarative sentences, deciding what to reveal, court documents, judging other people, not running from the truth, Daughters of the American Revolution, on being excluded by family, and maternal fantasies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Homes: The lawyers kept saying to me that you should sue your father for paternity. And I kept thinking, I don’t really want to do that. And a couple of things became clear to me. One was how interesting it is that one person’s decision to exclude you from your family history excludes you from all of your family history. Hundreds and hundreds of years, and yet you’re no more or less related to any one person than another. And how interesting is that someone could remove you from all that. So that was kind of fascinating to me. And then I was thinking about, if we did sue him, what would happen? And essentially, he would be legally compelled to not only produce some sort of a test or a document, but also to really answer all of the questions that had never been asked. And I also thought as an artist or writer that was most interested in these, by that point the reader knows who my biological father is well enough to participate in the reading, that I could just ask the questions and not even have to provide answers.

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