Interior Design presents a gallery of people who, for all their strangeness, seem deeply, touchingly familiar as they explore the designs of their private inner thoughts. Huddled under his covers with a flashlight, a young boy lies awake listening to his parents' bitter arguments, and he draws maps of imaginary planets on tennis balls, creating little worlds where his troubled family is somehow happy. A young man becomes obsessed with the idea of his guardian angel, and lives each day believing that it jealously hovers at his side, hungry for his every thought.

When Michael Kirby's mother begins to create strangely unsettling personalities before the private audience of her three children, she bestows upon Michael a double-edged gift: the ability to see past the ordinary surface of the world. After her performances lead to catastrophe, Michael embarks on a redemptive journey to uncover the hidden languages of his family, his lovers, even strangers. Through Michael's eyes the reader discovers the unsuspected terrors of a bowling alley, the insinuating force of the daily horoscope, the secret poetry of insurance, and the startling revelations that are possible on a carousel ride. Even simple objects at yard sales and auctions contain stories waiting to be revealed, whether it's a tape recorder holding the contagiously powerful suicide songs of a doomed lover, or the bent plastic arm of a doll that a timid child once waved to ward off imagined dangers. At once exuberantly comic and darkly disturbing, How to Read an Unwritten Language is...