Helen Rouner: In your mind, what is the relationship between your novel, Pan, and your memoir, White Out?
Michael Clune: Both books are an attempt to capture the world of a particular experience—panic, in Pan, and addiction, in White Out. I say "world" because these are not experiences that simply happen to you and pass on. They disclose a different geography, with its own special rules, its own procedures, its own population—which now and forever includes you. I think the worlds of panic and addiction only overlap intermittently with our ordinary public world. I set out to make maps of these places. In doing so I discovered that while the panic-world and the addiction-world are different places from our ordinary world—the world of television and news and realistic novels—they sometimes, weirdly, seem to overlap with each other. In both worlds, for example, and as I think you'll see if you read the books, death doesn't exist—or it doesn't exist in quite the way it does elsewhere.
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