Click here for books by Andrea Barrett A L S O+.T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Jim Harrison By Jonathan Miles The poet laureate of appetite talks about the saving power of animals, Charles Frazier's prose style and the tyranny of sexual correctness The Salon Interview: Ken Follett By David Bowman The thriller-master talks about Bob Dylan, working with Ross Perot and why he prefers the creature comforts of a luxury hotel to the perilous terrain of his heroes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host: The Autobiography of Larry Sanders Reviewed by Joyce Millman This pseudomemoir, like the long-running HBO show it derives from, delivers a fun house-mirror reflection of the late-night talk show wars T A B L E+T A L K What books will you be giving as gifts this year? Discuss your list in the Books area of Table Talk B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Andrew Sullivan By Carol Lloyd (11/30/98) Lorrie Moore By Dwight Garner (10/27/98) Grace Paley By A.M. Homes (10/26/98) Stephen King By Andrew O'Hehir (09/24/98) Richard Powers By Laura Miller (07/23/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		THE SALON INTERVIEW: ANDREA BARRETT | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - Is it true you were a high school dropout? Well, it's hard to explain, but I didn't finish high school, that's true. It was the early '70s and you could do things like that. And the fall of my junior year I just started applying to colleges hoping someone would take me. I really didn't want to be in high school anymore, so I left at the end of my junior year and just went right to Union College in Schenectady without a high school diploma. Were you already writing? Oh, no, that came late, way after college. I was going to be a biologist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I went briefly to graduate school in zoology. And I also went for a little longer but didn't finish in history. I studied medieval and reformation history and I didn't start writing until I was done with both those things. Did you know where you were headed when you started? I really didn't know anything, and for various reasons I couldn't go to writing school, so I was just wandering around trying to teach myself, which actually is a traditional way of learning to write. Although not here [in the United States], and not in the last 25 years. But it still works. It seems to. You had four novels published before "Ship Fever." Uh-huh. "Ship Fever" was my fifth book. And do you see them all as part of a piece, or did you vary your form very much? Well, it got considerably more complicated. I think when other people look at my books they see the first four as related and then these last two as related, and they see a big break in between them. It doesn't feel that way so much to me, even though the earlier ones are contemporary and the latter two are historical. I had always relied on lots of research for the stuff of my characters and their lives. In the earlier books, I wasn't moving them so far back in time, but one of the chief characters in my fourth novel, "The Forms of Water," is an 80-year-old ex-monk, which clearly I'm not. He has this long past in China, doing missionary work and living in a contemplative order. So I had to do the same kind of research to build and invent that character as I have had to do in these last couple of books. To me it all seems to have grown naturally, but I'm very aware that it doesn't look like that to other people. You've been quoted as saying that "Ship Fever" was a departure for you. In the sense that it was stories and not a novel, it was a departure. I had written very few stories before. I love short stories, and I had started to teach around the time of my fourth novel and was not only reading more stories but looking at them more intently and watching my students write them. I wanted to learn how to write them, and that's really how that book started. I never had in mind, "Oh, I'm going to make a book of stories about scientists." I just wrote some stories trying to teach myself to do certain things. N E X T+P A G E+| Science is an adventure - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.