![]() So it troubled her when, finally, the hoe started slipping from her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath and shallow bursts from her lungs, and smack dab in the middle of the day, she had to lie down. HUNT: (Reading) Zorrie Underwood had been known throughout the county as a hard worker for more than 50 years. Let's just begin at the beginning of the book and something as simple as a hoe in the ground and what it sets off in Zorrie. I want to give people an idea of your extremely rich narrative. That's how I experienced that world and that landscape. When I was living there in the 1980s at my grandmother's farm, just the two of us on this central Indiana farm, the landscape really was dominated, made exciting by these older women in the community - older farm women, retired teachers, fierce, smart, decent people. HUNT: I sort of feel like Zorrie was all over that rural Indiana landscape. Did you ever see Zorrie there, close up or at a distance? SIMON: You grew up, I gather, all over - Singapore, San Francisco, London - but ultimately a farm in Indiana. ![]() LAIRD HUNT: It's a pleasure to be with you. Laird Hunt teaches at Brown University and joins us now from Paris. ![]() The National Book Award finalist of a novel packs a hole absorbing human life into just 161 pages that are polished like jewels. She absorbs more loss and loneliness and keeps going. She's lost her parents to diphtheria at an early age and then, not much later, the aunt who stepped in to raise her. She's begun to tire after a life of hard work in Indiana and Illinois during the depression and then World War II and finds a postcard of Chicago in her mailbox and thinks she'd like to see it someday. Laird Hunt's "Zorrie" is about the kind of life we may not often read in novels.
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