Talking about her new novel, The Quality of Life Report, Meghan Daum responds to the question whether the novel’s protagonist, Lucinda Trout, is “just Meghan Daum in hoop earrings and a new kind of attitude”:

“I take it as a compliment that people think that the book is autobiographical, because that’s the job of a first-person narrator, to make you believe it’s real,” Daum says during an early-morning phone call to Los Angeles.