Powell’s Q&A: Sara Gruen
Posted by Sara Gruen, September 2, 2010 11:27 pm
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Filed under: Powell's Q&A, Q&A.
Describe your latest book.
Ape House is about a family of language-competent bonobo apes who are kidnapped from their home and mysteriously reappear a few months later as the stars of a reality TV show being filmed in a remote town in New Mexico.
Their main caretaker at the Great Ape Language Lab, Isabel Duncan, has an easier time relating to animals than she does to other humans. And she's not alone. We live in a world full of the faux intimacy that reality television and sites like Facebook have created. We have all this very superficial contact with and information about other people, and yet all this increased information has made it more difficult to form actual relationships. Isabel does not know how to connect. But all that changes when an explosion rocks the lab and her ape family is taken from her. She's set on a collision course with the human race, mostly in the form of a very married journalist who sees her ape family's abduction as the story of a lifetime.
I structured Ape House like a thriller ...
