Last night I attended a reading and interview of Jhumpa Lahiri at the University of Chicago. She read from a story in Unaccustomed Earth and then submitted to questions from a faculty member before taking questions from the audience. I learned a few things.
1. There are few things less enjoyable than sitting through a completely inept (and completely unnecessary) introduction. This man sounded like someone walked up to him on the street 5 minutes before and offered him 10 bucks to introduce a woman he had never heard of.
2. There is a tone of voice that, irrespective of what it's saying, grates on my nerves. One of my mother's televangelists has it. The woman interviewing Ms. Lahiri last night had it. She sounded like a hippie kindergarten teacher at pains to use her most delicate inside voice so as not to startle the children.
3. Writers don't necessarily like (talking to) their readers. It makes sense. You can't control what people take from your writing. And being asked to explain and validate someone else's psychic experience of your writing is probably fairly annoying (over and over again).
4. Jhumpa Lahiri hates e-books. She didn't actually say that. She said something like "to each his own." But she also said that even if she were stranded in a cave (or something) and couldn't physically carry her books with her, she still wouldn't take an e-reader. So that's what she meant. A woman after my own heart.
During the Q&A I got up to ask a question, but just as the student in front of me got hers out a woman came and whispered to the rest of the line that that would be the last question. I think I had a pretty good one. At least I wasn't going to ask her about how hard it is to be a brown writer (again).
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