Hearing from people who've spent a lot of time in what's called administrative segregation in California, which happens to be above death row, was fascinating to me because they know how death row works. And many of those people have become mentors to me and I have really valued their expertise and try to honor it in my own work. It's more like, I have a life and in my life I do certain kinds of social justice work that involves people serving life sentences. And I wouldn't really call that closeness a form of research.

I've become very close to people who are serving life sentences. On becoming close with people who are serving life sentences And in order to do that with authority, I needed to make her from somewhere that I understood.' And in order to fully inhabit the character and spirit of this woman who goes, I needed to be able to understand her prehistory. And California is a place where many poor people end up ensnared in the criminal justice system, and once they go there they're invisiblized to middle-class society. Because for me it's a book about California. I don't know if it was so much important, but it was the way that I knew to do this book. And she's from my neighborhood and knew my friends and lived in the world in which I lived.

She's more like an homage to people I was very close to at that time. 'It's not so much that my actual biographical life maps one to one to the narrator.

Scroll down to read an excerpt from 'The Mars Room'.

Kushner joins Here & Now's Mina Kim to talk about the book. Two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner's new novel ' The Mars Room' centers on a woman who's sentenced to two life terms plus six years in a California prison. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR) This article is more than 5 years old.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner