county library is delighted to host club books presentation of pm eastern this evening thank you all for coming out to be part of our great exchange between authors and readers in our community we hope you'll stick around after the presentation when you can purchase misused ins books with our partnering bookseller majors and quinn in the lobby and then you can have them signed if you'd like club book is presented by mel sought an alliance of metro public libraries and by the ramsey county library it's coronated by the library foundation of heaven county and funded by minnesota's legacy amendment arts and cultural heritage fund to learn more about club book and upcoming events you can look at the brochure that's on your chair or  book dot org pam used in is an award winning novelist essayist editor and teacher when people ask me to describe her books when i'm suggesting that they read them and they do this is what i say she's such a great out there she writes about strong independent women who love dogs horses and living in the whole world her characters always the wrong guys but the dogs are wonderful her newest novel contents may have shifted is a brilliantly written non linear novel about a woman travelling the world from alaska to tunisia from bhutan to newfoundland searching for authenticity and soaking up life it's my absolute pleasure to introduce you coming out tonight and going to be talking to about and reading to you from contents may have shifted which is my fifth book and it was actually born not too terribly far from here in madison wisconsin i was invited to the wisconsin book festival about seven years ago i guess now and asked to be part of an evening there called unveiled in which  authors were us to read work that was completely untested and untried and because my life moves pretty fast and i teach a lot and have a lot of jobs at the same time i ended up taking that assignment so seriously that i didn't start writing till i was on the plane to wisconsin and and i knew i would have about two days to write once i got there and and yet i was still kind of panicked so i i did what i tell my students to do when they claim writer's block or other maladies that keep them from writing and i say well just think about the things in the world that glimmer and lately think think about the things that really arrested your attention that attracted your attention and so that's what i did i just made twelve because i always think in twelve i made twelve little mini scenes to read that night and i believed that because i thought of them all at the same time they would bear some relationship to each other they would make a kind of arc together and those twelve are rough twelve many chapters of contents may have shifted so i just come to a memory for things that had really jumped out at me that had stuck with me and i wrote them down and because i move around a lot and i'm always on airplanes they happened in various places and i named each little mini scene with the place that happened and and then i read them that night actually right before i read them i was a few hours before i had to read them i polished them i stayed up all night we were talking earlier i don't sleep very much but i stayed up all night writing and i stayed up all night revising and then about four hours before the reading i thought i should just check that e mail i make sure i did everything i was supposed to do and so i went back to the e mail and i was right you know about the length and the amount of time and and then it said the only caveat is that you have to mention the state of wisconsin and it's and i've hardly been to his concent i've actually been to minnesota way more than i've been to wisconsin and that was one of the first times i had ever been there and so i got rid of next of the san juan which was one of my little mini scenes and put it aside and i went downstairs on to the street and sat on a street corner in madison wisconsin i waited for something to happen and after a little while it did and i went back upstairs and wrote it down and that became many chapter eleven madison wisconsin and then i was all set to read and so i read it that night with some other writers that i admire a lot and it seemed to go over pretty well and when the reading was over a writer that i loved you probably know richard because of the twelve thing but then my second thought was well yeah maybe so and so that was seven years ago and it only took five years for me to do that and you know it was five years of working really hard and what i found about writing a novel that is in a lot of pieces is that it doesn't take any less time in fact to about two years was right it was raining and then about three other years was deciding where all the pieces fit together and how to arrange them so that they made a novel they made an ark but seem not to but they were arranged to really seem random and have hazard and yet i wanted them to build a story and so i had so much fun moving them around to the book became sort of like a giant rejects cue and i could have honestly moved them around for the rest of my life except that i had a balloon mortgage payment and so i had to turn that i had to let it go eventually but i i mean you know happy with the order and it was i think every single piece every single one of one hundred forty four pieces was in every single one of the hundred forty four places but anyway it was really fun to write it but this way i probably won't do it again but i had a i had a really good time doing it it was sort of me doing exactly what i mean klein to do  so anyway i'll read you a little bit from it and we can talk about it you can ask me questions about it one hundred thirty two of the stories take place someplace like madison wisconsin or tucson arizona or durango colorado or istanbul turkey and twelve of the stories take place no place in other words on an airplane so there are twelve airplane stories bread throughout every twelve you got a figure that people used to ask me to describe this book i would start to talk about these numbers and you know their eyes go  blank it's obviously more meaningful to me and i don't know why by the way i don't know why a twelve i don't know why i used to be a river guide and i found that twelve was the right number of people on a river t you know there's obviously months and moons and apostles you know there's i guess for the chinese twelve is an important number but i don't know exactly why so i don't know i don't know why twelve but but things occur to me in groups of twelve anyway so this is one of the airplane stories i will start with it and then i'll read from there this is delta fifty five the plane is gradually but perceptibly descending it is barely light outside and we aren't do at orlean till nearly noon there is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing outside my window i come fully realise we are listing strenuously to the right i glance at my seat mate on the i o her name is rebecca she is a twenty six year old bank teller from cincinnati who has never flown before who has saved for five years to take her dream trip to paris i spent most of dinner telling her how much safer airplanes are than car travel how the seven seven seven has a minimum of three fail safes on each of its major systems how even if one of the engines fell clean off the fuselage it is designed to tumble backwards up and over the wing so it doesn't tear the wing from the plane now in spite of all my reassurances we seem to be heading shoulder first into the north atlantic ladies and gentleman the pilot says as many of you are probably aware we are descending preparing to make an unscheduled landing into reykjavik iceland approximately thirty five minutes ago we experienced an explosion in our number two engine and that engine is now in operable the ticking sound you hear is the wind running through it spinning the blades backwards much like a household fan you can probably also tell that we are tacking toward iceland much as we would in a sailboat as our current engine configuration will not give us power in a straight line now rebecca is awake and looking at me while died the man likes a metaphor i say and offer a small smile the layed out the window has strengthened and i can see white caps on an angry grey sea i always kind of wanted to go to iceland i say but by now rebecca is no longer looking at me she has her eyes closed tightly has given herself i am magine to prayer we will be landing in approximately fifteen minutes the captain says please give your undivided attention to the flight attendants as they instruct you in landing in the brace position i like that he did not say crash i like that he is a language guy the ocean is getting quite a bit closer no sign of iceland out my window and i hope that reykjavik airport does not turn out to be a metaphor for fucked just when it seems that our wheels have to be skimming the water land and runway lights appear and then more of them so many lights it is hard to count them a sea of spinning red and blue every ambulance and fire truck in iceland seems to have come out to greet us holy cow i say just before the wheels hit the foam and the foam splashes up and covers all the windows throwing the cabin and a half light exactly like waking up in a tent after a snowstorm and then everyone is cheering as the plane glides to a jerky sticky stop much later in an upstairs blank space of terminal as we are being fed rice with some kind of yellow chicken we go all over it by something resembling the icelandic red cross the crew tells us the reason for the emergency equipment when the number two engine exploded it spit jet fuel all over the fuselage we were amala tough cocktail hurdling through space is the way the literary pilot puts it there was no way to be certain that the friction of the tires on the runway wouldn't make a spark and ignite us turn us into a ninety mile per hour because the orcas are predators and the humpbacks are prey and it's been a long day we've been all the way up tracy arm to the glaciers and everyone but the captain and i are sleeping when word comes over the radio or cas in shearwater cove by the time we get there there's nothing stirring a couple of lazy humpbacks out in the main channel a sure sign that the orcas are gone the captain is worried about the hour worried about the fuel he's got left worried about his daughter who's got magenta hair and a t shirt that says this is what a feminist looks like who is back from somewhere like reed college working on his boat this summer selling soon as to the tourist through a permanent scowl there's a fin flash on the far side of the channel distant but unmistakable orca male the captain says that's four miles across this channel minimum i shone the silver charm around my neck remind him that it's my last day in alaska promise to swim for shore if we run out of gas don't lose that fin he says turning the bow into the sunset but i couldn't lose it if i tried the water of stephen's passage backlit a million diamonds rushing toward me in the sun and one blackfin impossibly tall absurdly geometric the accompanying blast of whale breath above it superimposed on to the patterns of light spotting whales at sea is not so different from spotting deer in the woods for hours you see nothing and then you see one and suddenly you realize you are surrounded this pod has twenty five by my best counting the one male who keeps his distance and twenty four females all of them running steadily west we get out in front and the captain shuts down the engines every time the big males fin turns itself up and over and back down under the surface of the water i can't help myself i gasped we are directly in the path of one of the females every time she surfaces we can hear her breathing every time she surfaces i can see the spot of white at her heart twenty years ago on my first trip to alaska i bought a string of white hart tree beads and for this trip by tour the house apart to find them in three more dives shall be under the boat i touched the beads at my neck and try to guess which side of the boat will get me the closest the others are stirring crowding the port side watching her approach i choose starboard she does one last time and i start counting at five she rises right under my hand the breath from her blow hole is cold on my face if i dared i could reach down and touch her on her white spot someone behind me screams maybe the captain's daughter but the whale is already diving already resurfacing a few yards farther on i listen to the sweep of her fin the puff of her breathing until she disappears into the disappearing diamonds when the male's big fin is the only thing visible a speck on the horizon we turn the boat north and head for home this is a band saying hi laos my guides and i are standing in the warm midst of a me congress are mourning in the village of bands and high laos watching an unusually tall laotian tend his boiling vats of loud allow the rice wine moonshine that has put his village on the map monkeys scream in the trees above us and a gentle faced woman stands nearby holding a glass i fear is meant for me it is slightly after eight a in america that would be a good enough reason to decline politely but here in laos where the decorum is far more rigorous and complicated than it is in america i'm pretty sure there isn't going to be a way out of drinking the pickled me congo water that is about to come from the steaming rusted fifty gallon drum i reassure myself that no self respecting amoeba could possibly live in eighty proof hooch and quickly down the glass of white i am offered which gets me another glass and then a glass of red which i realise the second it goes down my throat without searing my tonsils isn't nearly as strong as the way i am seized with regret flooded by premonitions of feverish vomiting in a laotian health care facility i do what any sophisticated world traveler would do and stuff an entire antibacterial wipe into my mouth and during the tour of the brightly painted temple sucked every drop of juice out of it i can and swallow outside the temple a beautiful woman is making ferns and bougainvillea and daisy petals out of colored paper i bought by a small bouquet from her and ask if i can take her picture and she says something design and he translates she says she should take your picture because you are the beautiful one and i can tell by the tone in his voice that he thinks she is mistaken so is the most formal guide i have ever had in asia which is saying a great deal he had been a monk for three months in eighteen then he became one again for one day last year when his mother die if you can so he could carry her body he says to the other side his english is impeccable except that he says electric city when he means electricity and comfort table when he means comfortable and anyone can see why he would think that was correct at least twice a day he says if i am not speaking right you will please grab your weight me but i rarely do am pretty sure i have managed to eat the anti bacterial way of clandestinely into we're back on the boat heading down river to the magical city of luan provide and sighs says have i told you yet how the buddha died when i say no he says he was invited to the house of a friend for dinner and they were serving pock pock i say pock pock he says mildly impatient with me as usual and he makes an oinking noise in his throat i say smiles he knew the pock was bad says knew even that it would kill him but he ate it anyway because it was most important not to offend his hosts i guess that's the difference i almost say between buddha and me but on the off chance that has paid me a compliment i smile at the muddy river and this is i have not been on the property thirty minutes when i am lying on a massage table in a softly lit front of pani scented room with a person named trevor towering over me i can see he says that you were doing a lot of spiritual work because look how far you are out in your hair his accent is vaguely south african and he has the most impressive unibrow i have ever seen i do not read poetry trevor says because i live poetry he picks my feet up and lets them fall back to the table may i ask you he says why the lower half of your body is perpetually standing in ice cold water he means energetically of course because the room is warm and my legs are dry and what happened here he asked not waiting for an answer he has his hand on my leg at the exact place where  when i was four years old my father threw me so hard against a big oak wardrobe that i broke my femur the bone healed forty years ago i was cast in from the tip of my toes to my armpits for months but trevor is not the first healer to be able to see what happened my father i begin i am not afraid of your pain trevor says but i am not afraid of your grief i am not afraid of your terror you want to know why i am not afraid of your terror i nod i am not afraid of your terror because i've gone inside the monster and inside the monster is pure wonder somewhere in this building my friend willow who i have come to canyon ranch with is getting a nice simple lavender scrub and an herbal wrap i'm will look through the catalog thought yes the first night maybe a nice herbal wrap after all that travel pamela trevor says will you tell me your father's name so that i may ask him to excuse himself from the lower half of your body yes i say and i do sebastian you must get out of there sebastian he says it does not belong to you he has his eyes closed and his hands tight around my ankles no sebastian he says more forcefully now there are no options we stay like that for an excruciating amount of time then he folds my hands across my chest and covers them with his if you could have only one thing he says which you choose peace or ecstasy ecstasy i think but i'm pretty sure i'm supposed to say peace peace is an illusion trevor says i am in the ecstasy nearly all the time now even when i sleep i think of the composer's lonely bed room the terrible black sheets the clock radio projecting blood red digits on to the ceiling his bald head a glinting cabernet color like someone already dead pamela trevor says slapping the bottom of my feet with his p yes sir i say out of habit he's got my wrists now is stretching them back over my head no one has ever called me pamela except my father you have two glasses trevor says one is completely full and one is completely empty in which glass is stillness possible the full one i say the questions are getting easier trevor now has his powerful thumbs wrapped almost completely around my upper most vertebra you can get to still through ecstasy he says but you can't get to ecstasy through stillness i think about all the ways the language of the new age is custom made for terrorism i think about when a pink mouth opened in a white sky over davis and i saw for the second time the cupped waving hands when one of the doing lines in your life intersects with the circle of your now trevor says what happens it has to bend i say confident follow an old llama to the top of a bald hill above the monastery in the cool morning air we have been told there will be three corpses a man a woman and a child and that they are unrelated though they appear to us like a little family laid out on the platform wrapped in their cotton shrouds we are very lucky shearing says many corpses today when he says corpse it sounds like cops as in pines the man who will prepare the bodies arrives and begins to unwrap the first corpse a little ways up the hill roughly one hundred vultures jockey for position against a rope held in place by family members of the deceased they are wild birds but tree growing is the most accessible monastery practicing sky burials the birds know to come at eleven am for their almost daily feed shrink told us the bodies would be quartered but the word fully it is the one that jumps to mind he explains that the man with the big knife will make four incisions one around the chin one down the center of the torso and two at a diagonal down the shoulder blades they pull the skin off the bones he says because if they don't give the vultures the bones first they sometimes eat the flesh and leave the bones and then the whole person doesn't ascend together and there is more work for the butchers to pound the poke he hesitates enough over the word butcher that i know he is not quite happy with it but he doesn't know a better one these men he says that do the cutting they are not allowed to marry their karma is very bad same with the men who butcher animals do you mean this job is punishment for their last life i ask him or that they will be punished for this job in the next life yes he says also jewellers it is the same jewellers i say why it is just what we believe he tells me is it because they are wealthy i ask it is just what we believe he says again all three bodies are cut into pieces and i miss whatever sign the lama gives to the men who have been holding the rope when the vultures run in the smell takes up all the air on the mountain top and as they rush past me i can see they are huge birds each of them half the size of a man there is squawking and shrieking several birds go after one femur another makes off with the forearm the hand with all the flesh still on it bouncing along the stones at my feet no fewer than six persons are pulling in different directions on a skull that is still attached to a spine that is still attached to one leg and the skull is laughing the old lama plays tug of war with a vulture over a leg bone and when he wins he lifts another vulture this one nearly featherless out of the melee and gives him what is left of the bone that is a sick one showing says every so often the butcher picks up an especially aggressive vulture by its head and hauls it off to the side when there is nothing but skulls and pelvis as the butcher steps back in and pounds the big bones into pulp with a giant mallet bone pope flies all over the place then a huge wad of it lands on shrinks arm in seconds a member of the family of the deceased comes over with a little bottle of alcohol and wipes it clean for him his preparedness makes me realise this must happen all the time showing smiles at the man out from under his scooby doo hat on the walk back down the hill showing says when i see a sky burial all desire to have money and get more things goes away because you see a man then you see him dead in a ball then you see him cut to pieces and in twenty minutes he is nothing it is like he never existed shrink pics age so that we can burn it in the little stupid back at the monastery when we get there he shows me how to stick my whole upper body in so that i won't take the bad dead people luck with me back into the world when i can't see or breathe anymore i pull my head out but then zing grabs me by the scruff of the neck and pushes me back in it is very unusual showing says when dancing finally turns me loose a westerner here at the ceremony dancing is afraid that now the car will crash dancing holds haley in the stupa so long i think she will surely expect ca when he finally lets her out he talks with urgency for several minutes to shoring into baton and when he's finished we ask what he said shrink thinks a long time and says don't sing says it's good to be happy all of the time really really says all those words and sharing says after a pause he says it is sometimes also good to be sad all right a few more and we'll chat this is seventy one milwaukee wisconsin driving from chicago in the minus six degree weather neck craned out the window looking for the lunar eclipse because the rocket scientists told me to but the light pollution extends all the way to the wisconsin border and i think i'm probably facing the wrong direction anyhow if i became the rocket scientist girlfriend that fortune cookie about me being the reasonable one would never ever ever be true in milwaukee everything is frozen solid the river the stop lights even my car door but when i get to my high rise hotel room there is the eclipse right out my window halfway over and looking strange enough to scare a caveman or an ancient egyptian to death trish comes to meet me for breakfast with her sperm bank in vitro baby and i have no idea how to respond as she details all the ways her life has become a living hell she knows i thought she was crazy to do it at her age alone with her eighty hour a week job and now here she is as if to prove me wrong but everything she says makes her life about ten times worse than i could have imagined lake is frozen out as far as you can see blocks of ice heaved up on the shore like wrecked cars and cliff parker whose law firm is sponsoring my visit picks me up and takes me to the milwaukee country club for lunch it is so much like the country club in bethlehem pennsylvania that my father could just barely afford to belong to it takes my breath away only it is like it is still nine hundred seventy two in milwaukee wisconsin the white wallpaper with little parasol toting maidens doing tours of teams across it the four dead grey haired ladies propped up in the corner as if to look like they're playing bridge the place probably seats two fifty not even counting the no women allowed grill downstairs and yet other than the dead ladies in the corner we are the only ones eating today the point of this luncheon i quickly understand is so that cliff can show me why he is a lawyer and not a writer to show me the kind of life he gave up writing for he is invited eight people to the luncheon besides the two of us and exactly none of them show up i can't decide if cliff parker is a sociopath or just so completely normal that he is in comprehensible to me our waitress is actually named trudy she has a beehive hairdo and is at least one hundred fourteen years old we both ordered the cobb salad and for some inexplicable reason it takes forty five minutes to arrive the room is being heated to a sultry eighty five degrees and there is a squirrel hurling himself repeatedly up the floor to ceiling window behind cliff's head over and over he climbs the nearest tree and then flies flying squirrel style and lands splat with his face against the window where his paws achieve suction for a little more than one second before he slides like a cartoon character down to the bottom of the glass he does this five or six times before i comment on it though it makes such a terrible noise every time he hits i can't believe cliff doesn't turn around probably rabid cliff says with a casual wave of his hand and i feel my eyebrows go up and he says a lot of the squirrels around here are this is eighty portland oregon rick says pam if everyone deserved it down pillow there wouldn't be any more birds yeah this is one eleven trenton new jersey let's say for the sake of argument that my back hurts so much because when i was four and in my three quarter body cast my mother found it easiest to carry me around upside down like a monkey using the plaster b doctors had fashioned between my knees to keep them for three and a half months the correct distance apart and let's say she did just that until my second to last appointment where the orthopedic surgeon said you haven't been carrying around by this bar have you and my mother shot one quick glance at my father and said of course not no and it became a funny story the two of them like to tell together to friends over a couple of drinks and let's say that when their friends asked as of course they would how in the name of heaven a four year old breaks her femur they said that i had somehow managed to pull the giant wardrobe overawed to myself except instead of words they would have said credenza because it would have made us sound richer than we were i still don't see how it would make me feel any better to think of the pain in my hip and spine as anything other than my most loyal and valuable companion the continuous non voice in my ear that says you got out alive and you still get to go no two people who have ever lived loved to travel more than my mother and father they gave that love in their fashion to me and i will finish up with istanbul turkey at the sultan's palace beautiful long limbed girl sexy but not too sexy lots of brassy hair surrounded by seven or eight international travelers her age to an australian boy with acne scars she says you were walking through the top to pee palace with three beautiful women what more do you want the other young women are not in the same room of beautiful as she but they accept the compliment don't dare to interrupt the boy says maybe if you were all naked and laughs one of the other girls a swede says no meaning go fuck yourself acne face the breast you haired girl hold your fingers to the swedes lips says my parents taught me never to say no immediately to men the swede to anything she  says istanbul is the only major city in the world that is situated on two continents since three thirty a d it has been the capital of the roman empire the byzantine empire the latin empire and as recently as one nine hundred twenty two the ottoman empire in the hilly streets ruin leans into palace leans into internet cafe we are in line waiting to get into the harem miles of tiled lol it corridors and rooms so thick with ghosts of women in captivity couldn't feel their hair on your are there jasmine scented breath on your face in contemporary istanbul the dervishes have finally invited the women to whirl in the blue mosque there two hundred fifty thousand tiles the color of sky when the sun comes out inside the sky and outside is golden i am forty six years old and ashamed of the fact that this is the first mosque of my life but later when the evening call to prayer touches me in the garden between the blue mosque and the highest sophia call an echo echo an answer bouncing off domes and turrets that have stood on this hill for fifteen hundred years i no faith springs out of doubt like topsoil and one thing i am is here right now across the golden horn where the bosphorus meets the sea of marmara the asian part of the city glistens in the twilight as a candidate for the center of everything istanbul beats pueblo colorado hands down the goals are turning cartwheels around the towers of the blue mosque and calling like crazy women byzantium i say  circle of my now is wreaking havoc with the lines of my doing i am learning to say yes if not always immediately a sweet faced turkish boy maybe nineteen offers me a kleenex puts both hands over his heart when i take it says i look just like his mother when i cry thanks novel that usually happens these are all these are all based on experiences that i have had now so so i do a lot of traveling i do a lot of traveling for work i go to a lot of places and write about those places i used to do a lot of travel writing back when they hired writer real writers to do travel writing and they're always little pieces left over you know things that didn't fit in the article that i saved  so i had i had little bits i have files on my computer just that are just left over things you know so some of them are that i did travel for this book any body that asked me to go anywhere i would go with the potential of adding another place to the mix but but the first eleven the only one i read of those two you the only one of those hybrid to you juneau alaska that happened to be one of the first ones and i had been to juneau recently and that was that first you know i was just writing so that i'd have something to read that night that's just where the book began and then it took a few years to compile others that i already had you know turn them into these little mini chapters i had certain rules about the many chapters they they had to be between one sentence and three pages long they couldn't go over three pages and then what was so much fun about this book in that period was that it was kind of like a a mulligan stew like anything that happen could go in or could potentially go away and so i always tell my students you know henry james advice which is a writer should strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost and so i was paying attention i  that i don't know about the exact order but but the first the first twelve i'm pretty sure were from the reading except and then i had to take out these next of this and one which is still in this book but it moved and moved and moved and moved and moved and it's all the way at the end now at to put in madison which was what happened when i went downstairs because i had to mention wisconsin but i believe all the rest of these it's possible that oakland california was later and traded out but most of these are the  original the first probably i think oakland california actually changed its city but not it's this is why i call that fiction so i could mess around with stuff like that and i had all these different rules you know like you couldn't have two california to afters in the same twelve or you could only have four chapters from any particular international destination like i drove myself crazy with my rules you know and so you make all these little rules to reassure yourself that it's something while i'm eating my twelve gold like as if that's a real thing you know well i have i have two or scenes in each twelve that come from a foreign country so i must have something like you tell yourself these lives so that you that you keep fear at bay basically i think writing is really all about keeping fear at bay and for me the way i keep fear ballet is to really really focus on the physical scene so i don't have to think too much about the emotions or what i'm about to reveal and by making these artificial forms that make me feel like i'm filling boxes i'm one hundred forty four boxes to fill and i have all these rules about how i have to  to them in the first place remain although i'm a little sick of it you know because i'm not only have i done all those things you said i've been reading from this book now for over a year so i think you know and this happens to every writer you just get oh isn't that funny you know that was really funny you know but you do get a little sick of yourself however different things about every section pop depending on what their next two and also depending on how i read them you know i sometimes i'll choose a reading based on a conversation i've had five minutes before the reading and then and of course i'm not reading them in order so they have a specific order that was painstakingly arranged to make certain things pogge you know that the literary theory of us who were in fashion when i was in grad school which are much much much different from the other theorists who are in fashion now  they believed well at least one of them one of them who i understood a little believed you know that meaning get this is one of the few things i really took with me from grad school meaning is getting made two ways all the time it's getting made metaphorically in other words by substitution right and it's getting made men and men and women by proximity so every word that's next to every other word means something a little different because of the words of the next two likewise paragraphs like waste chapters so so much of this rearranging which i was so happy doing and could have done forever was really about just the nuances in each scene that would that but but to answer your question not really the thing that drew me to it in the first place is still there and is still the main thing though i do find little things like just tonight in fact when i read it timbo which i read a lot because it's one of my favorite places in the world you know when she says my parents taught me never to say no to anything you know never to say now and she says to to man and she says no to anything like i overheard the conversation that the actual conversation in line at the harem in just a moment and you know i knew it was kind of a beautiful conversation in the way that you know you want to grab something and take it to the page but i really heard it tonight in reference to pam's childhood and and like i eat like i even thought i took the time to think while trying not to cough and reading out loud what would it be like to have parents like that like i really heard what it meant to me tonight for some reason although at the time it was just part of this beautiful conversation where the guy said maybe if you're all naked like like the whole conversation was just a gift and i was just standing right next to it  and it's just as i recorded it back conversation but i didn't but tonight just for what it's worth i heard that in relation to the stuff that we learned about pam and her family and you know just how would those with those parents look like parents who taught you above all never to say no to anything you know i really paused there for a minute in my mind and so that was something that popped out to me that hadn't before to answer your question specifically here yes i do but i don't think about it too much but i'm very very interested in this border land between fiction and nonfiction and i do not believe it's a simple divide i also don't believe that you can just throw up your hands and say oh it doesn't matter where they make stuff up or not you know like i but but you know anyone who's ever tried to write a memoir or a personal essay knows that memory is followed will languages fallible there's all kinds if your goal is to tell how it really happened if that is your goal you're going to run into trouble just by virtue of the fact that you're working with language and memory and subjective observation the twenty five people who saw the same cards and that is never my goal as a writer i mean i want to get my facts right right and i want to get my details right because i think the details know more than i do that the physical stuff of the story the metaphor is smarter than me but by the same token i'm not trying to recreate a reality specifically my goal is to take all this raw material from the physical world you know the actual world and then shape it into story and with this book i really didn't know what they say they what my publisher was gonna want to call it and so every time the question came up for me i just sort of blew by and i was like well let's keep writing just keep collecting stuff and then they'll decide and obviously in this day and age if it had been called a memoir it would have sold more copies and i would have gotten more money so in a sense i could take the high road by calling it a novel in a way like the burden of the market was witness these things that's why they're here that was the driver behind the novel but you know in all my rules i made like i moved from town to town and i you know never when you could tell but it was just a scene that could have happened anywhere it's like oh too much california let's move t georgia you know like i haven't done stuff like that and i couldn't change that stuff back if we had called it a memoir and would have but you know we are in a moment an odd literary moment where there is a law against calling it nonfiction or memoir let's get nonfiction out of this equation calling it memoir if you made stuff out and there is no law against calling it fiction if it's all true so i went where there wasn't a lot with you know the approval of my publisher and then we had another big conversation about whether i should call myself pam or not and i was going to call myself melanie mel and like these you know three letter androgenous names i was going to call myself mel and  and i had a long talk with a lawyer and it was depressing as talks with lawyers are oh it just made me feel dirty like to let you know you know talking to a literary lawyer will always make you feel like a scumbag and i really like her i can just picture you know with like the cigarette of brandy and and she's got that new york voice you know she's like stuff anyway so i have these three or four hour conversations with the lawyer who i feel like is my friend even though we have never been face to face and it always makes me feel gross so after this conversation with the lawyer about this book after we had decided to call it a novel  but we were going to call me pam i called my editor and i said sure i just call myself melanie and just get it over and she said no i think you should call yourself pound because we want them to understand that it's pam and it's not paris which is exactly what i wanted people to understand and some people really react badly to you know i've had two things happen i've had readings this woman said but i really wanted it to b and i was like well it kind it is and she said no i really wanted it to be you and i was like well you will know me like like she's cooler than me like she's better you know you'll like her better than you would actually like me if you knew me which has been proven and i get it i may get it again and again through iowa that is one thing i can say for sure and then this other guy in san francisco he came out to be and he's like if you made anything up right there and and that's another thing about this this is funny we weren't going to say anything on the book this book owes a lot of a certain amount of itself to you know to this wonderful book the things they carried which says nothing doesn't say a novel it doesn't no it's filed in fiction you know it's shelved in fiction it was librarians they know about these things but so we were going to say anything and they gave me the cover they sent me the cover just like this without the little cloud and i really liked it i thought oh they read the book like that's cool they read the book but i also thought that's a little cold it's a little ironic it's a little too ironic for my readership and i teach with a lot of ironic people so i'm always kind of i'm the irony police you know so i was like i really like it but it's a little cold and then they sent it to me with the heart and i was like i really like it but it's a little sentimental and it's amazing what a little cloud in the shape of a heart can do but then we thought if the cloud had a job it wouldn't be so sentimental so that's when we put a novel in the cloud i say we the designers you know and then it became a little less sentimental because the cloud had a job so in a certain way that also had to do you know wonder how these decisions get made out that had to do with why we just sort of go right up front with the word novel we weren't going to say that because even if you believe it's fiction you wouldn't necessarily believe it was a novel right because it's in so many pieces i mean i believe it is but you know some people might not so anyway that's how the words a novel got on the front because the cloud needed the job but you know it's funny how all the things around the writing that comes to have meaning yeah say over that i really i mean i put them in an order because the perp i mean to say i put them in an order on purpose would be the understatement of the century i woke up in the middle of the night when i don't know chapter twenty four has to go over there by thirty six however you know part of the beauty of it experimental for is that you know you you participate you the reader participate in it so i would think it would be i mean obviously i come in to read all over the place so it would be fine with me if you did but they do occur in this order so even as you jumped around you would know that you were jumping around you know and not reading them in order which would