Interview

Haven Kimmel discusses life, poetry, Jane Austen - and her family and friends as portrayed in A Girl Named Zippy.

[A hand reaches out and depresses a knob on a little blue tape recorder. Someone says "glamorous park bench." Tapping sound. Throat clearing.]

Hello, and welcome to Interview. Let's just go straight to our guest, author Haven Kimmel, and have her answer a few questions about her book, A Girl Named Zippy.

You had some unusual experiences in the beginning of your life--a near fatal staph infection, baldness until almost three, and, most memorably, your first words at three years old: "I'll make a deal with you." How did this unusual start affect your life?

I'm of the opinion (I share this with some contemporary literary theorists, I think) that the word "text" is both broad and deep metaphorically, and thus we can, without much shame or sense of personal responsibility, litter our conversation with it. So let's say an individual life is a text; in A Girl Named Zippy I simply read my life backwards. The person I am now is essentially that weird little mute bald girl, only taller. And with hair, obviously. James Hillman, in his book The Soul's Code, proposes the "...