Thacker Mountain Radio returns to Oxford after a summer spent on the road. This week's author is Catherine Lacey, who is the University of Mississippi's 2017 Grisham Writer in Residence. The show will feature performances by the Memphis reggae band Chinese Connection Dub Embassy and local synth-pop duo And The Echo.
Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and is based in Chicago.
Her latest novel, The Answers, follows a struggling Mary who lives in New York City and needs a certain health treatment she can't afford. She's in serious debt and out of options when she signs up for a mysterious job advertised as "The Girlfriend Experiment," which she learns is the creation of narcissstic actor Kurt Sky. Determined to find the perfect relationship, Sky hires several women to provide different girlfriend-like functions. Mary's role is to play the "Emotional Girlfriend" and she falls into Kurt's ego-driven and messy attempts at human connection.
Dwight Garner of the New York Times wrote, "In her new novel, The Answers, she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought, and then she drops you down the rabbit hole. She’s the real thing, and in The Answers she takes full command of her powers."
Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey.