Kirsten Krauth

Sarah Centilli's Draw Your Weapons, which is creative nonfiction, and she's a writer from the States, and she's toured here a couple of times, and I interviewed her for a newspaper.

But her book is just the most dazzling array of different things.

So it's written in fragments, and it's a combination of – it's got memoir and –

photographic theory and theology and what I really liked about it and what you know quickly became one of my favorite books ever is that she structures it in fragments so that there are lots of gaps in the narrative there are gaps between the fragments and I really loved this idea that by having gaps

the reader just sort of launches in and dives into the work and kind of links it all together in their imagination.

So that was important to me.

I was really trying to have this idea, as you picked up in your review, which was beautiful, this idea of having a broken mirror and it's up to the reader to put all the fragments back together in the way that they want to.

And that fits in with the mixtape idea as well.

Yes.

Well, another one that was mentioned in your show, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, that probably had the most influence on the book, I think.

This book just absolutely blew me away when I read it.

Again, it's mainly about structure for me.

I just find structure a really exciting thing, especially when I'm writing in fragments.

But I loved how this was sort of a, you know, it's set in the 70s and 80s for starters and it jumps around in time like my book does.

And it's like a relay between characters.

It's like the characters pass that on from one to another as it goes.

And I just found it really stylistically exciting.

Yeah, well, I looked at a lot of memoirs.

Music memoirs were really important to me because they give such an idea of time and place.

Yeah, so Robert Forster's book about the go-betweens, absolutely, I absolutely loved it.