Everyone knows this can happen. People travel and they find places they like so much they think they’ve risen to their best selves just by being there. They feel distant from everyone at home who can’t begin to understand. They take up with beautiful locals of the opposite sex, they settle in, they get used to how everything works, they make homes. But maybe not forever.

I had an aunt who was such a person. She went to Istanbul when she was in her twenties. She met a good-looking carpet seller from Cappadocia. She’d been a classics major in college and had many questions to ask him, many observations to offer. He was a gentle and intelligent man who spent his days talking to travelers. He’d come to think he no longer knew what to say to Turkish girls, and he loved my aunt’s airy conversation. When her girlfriends went back to Greece, she stayed behind and moved in with him.   This was in 1970.

Prologue: Make Straight the Paths

 Ciara Neal, bleary eyed at the bar, was vaguely aware that her friends had left. In fact, all the customers were gone except her, and still Fran didn’t call closing time. She hovered nearby, clearing off glasses and muttering. Something about a priest. Then a word that managed to penetrate Ciara’s brain fog.

“Did you say ‘vigilantes’?”

“Drink this.”

Fran slammed down a coffee mug in front of her. It didn’t smell like coffee. Didn’t taste like any tea Ciara knew of. Presumably it was the same stuff that Fran swilled down every night. If she had to guess, she’d have said it was brewed from tobacco leaves.

“I’ve been listening to you mouth off all night,” Fran said, “louder and louder with each beer you put away. And here’s what I have to say to you: quit your whining. How many people even have the chance to go to college?”

PROLOGUE

Lilacs were blooming in Cracauerplatz. The Visitor felt disoriented and alone, an outsider, lost without a map. Her atrophied German stuck in her throat. Thirty-one years had elapsed between her last stay in Germany (for an ill-fated job in Frankfurt) and her return to Berlin in late middle age. The city struck her as post-apocalyptic—flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. She found herself nameless: nameless in crowds, nameless alone. Another disappearance in a city with a long history of disappearance acts.

“I’m wracking brain, Izaac. Who is Stanley Brozek? This name is ringing a bell, but I cannot place it.”

Izaac tapped the paper lightly against his thigh. “I don’t know. Come.”

He tossed the newspaper on top of her galoshes to offer Ludka his arthritic hands, which were still good enough for leverage.

“Take a breath, kochanie, and come with me into the kitchen. I’m going to have a little drink and I suggest you do, too. One drink won’t shatter our wits. Come now.”

Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Chiara Barzini . Her debut novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, is available now from Doubleday.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

Support the show at Patreon or via PayPal.

So The Disintegrations is a book about a man obsessed with death, who knows nothing about it and is trying to understand it. You call it a novel, yet most of the names that appear in the novel are those of actual people, including the protagonist, who bears your name. Similarly, the book is an investigation into Culver City’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Why shouldn’t the reader just think of this as memoir or creative nonfiction?

Well, this book, as with all my writing, springs from non-fiction, that’s always the departure point. But as a writer I can’t stay within those parameters; as soon as I start writing, it shifts into fiction. To call it CNF or memoir would be an act of bad faith.

Robert

In some cultures, alluding to the dead is considered taboo. Even remembering them is forbidden. Above all, one must never utter the deceased individual’s name.

 Now that I think of it, I have known a couple more people who’ve died. First there was Robert. It’s not like I knew him well or anything, but I did know him.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the guest. Her new novel, The Book of Joan, is available now from Harper. It is the official April selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Lidia’s third appearance on the podcast. She first appeared on August 5, 2012, in Episode 93, and again on July 15, 2015, in Episode 370. All episodes can be streamed free of charge.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

Support the show at Patreon or via PayPal.

Get Brad Listi’s sporadic email newsletter.

Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Ron Currie , author of the novel The One-Eyed Man, available from Viking. The official March selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

This is Ron’s second time on the podcast. He first appeared in Episode 4, which aired on September 28, 2011.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

Support the show at Patreon or via PayPal.

Get Brad Listi’s sporadic email newsletter.

Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Lindsey Lee Johnson . Her debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, is available from Random House.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

Support the show at Patreon.

This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Michelle Tea . Her new novel, Black Wave, is available now from Feminist Press.

Listen via iTunes.

This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Mike Roberts , author of the debut novel  Cannibals in Love, available now from FSG Originals. Roberts also wrote the screenplay for the movie Goat, out in theaters now.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with TNB Poetry editor Rich Ferguson , whose debut novel, New Jersey Me, is available now from Rare Bird Books / A Barnacle Book. Big congrats to Rich! Go buy his book!

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Nicole Dennis-Benn. Her debut novel Here Comes the Sun is available now from Liveright. It is the official September pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.

This week on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Garth Risk Hallberg , author of the bestselling novel City on Fire, available now in trade paperback from Vintage.

Get the free Otherppl app.

Listen via iTunes.