From W be EZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerd at Book Club. It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. It is the month of January,

and our book this month is Molly McGee's

Strange and surreal debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy,

you are kind.

Our protagonist is Jonathan Abernathy whose life is completely

subsumed by debt. He inherited debt from his parents, he has student loans,

it's all very precarious, rent is tricky, food is scarce. So in a very very is Dream Auditor and the gig opens up a whole new world of both literal and symbolic misery.

Dream Auditors go into other people's dreams and remove the things that are making them anxious or depressed so that they can work more effectively

the next day.

This is one of those books where the absurd ends up perfectly illuminating reality and that is all I am

going to say for now because I want this conversation with Molly to be spoiler free.

Molly welcome to Nertab. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Oh, it's an honor to have you.

So I would love to talk about how you wrote the dreams themselves because they're so surreal.

I listened to the audiobook version of this and especially that it was just like like you're just on such a wild ride you know?

I struggle myself with really intense insomnia and when I do sleep I have these really extreme

very vivid dreams and so sort of exploring how dreaming works in the novel, I did a lot of research, but I also took some really intense cues from some of the fucked up dreams that I've had.

And I don't know about you guys what your dreaming life is like, but throughout my

promotion of this book I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about dreams and their dreams specifically and what I found is they're so

Personal right they're all everybody dreams very differently. It's true. Well I have always loved

asking people specifically about work stress dreams because that is such a specific

flavor and everybody's got them but they're so different depending on the

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