Siri Hustvedt Gives Perception Center Stage In A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women

Boston WBUR Radio's Jim Sullivan reviews the latest book and interviews Siri by phone. "It doesn’t take me long to realize I’m in a very meta situation: I am a man speaking on the phone with a woman who wrote a book called A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.

"“Novels are the hardest thing in the world,” she says, “because I have this sense of the essay as a roaming intellectual form, but nevertheless I’m writing in my own voice. When I write in a novel, I’m inhabiting someone else or multiple people. That is both more exciting and more difficult. A novel is an organism and as the organism begins to grow, I hang on for dear life and begin to follow that animal to wherever it wants to take me.”"