Wednesday’s breakfast was a terrific mashup of personalities, with four authors who strive for different audiences acknowledging one shared trait: a most serious love of reading.
Mindy Kaling, who plays the self-centered and predatory Kelly on the hit show The Office, served as emcee. She announced that she was at BEA "to talk about who will be the next boss on The Office," and that her book is "the first in a series of seven that will extend over 30 years and end on a cliffhanger. Just kidding!" In fact, her book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Crown, Nov.), is "a series of short comic essays somewhere between Tina Fey, who has no apparent vices, and Chelsea Handler, who has every one imaginable." In a more serious vein, Kaling, who attended Dartmouth, spoke about her childhood in Cambridge, Mass., when her father would drop her off at the library every day with a reading list, pick her up at the end of the day, and ask for a book report every week. "Our family respected books so much you could not leave one on the floor."
After being introduced by Kaling as "the pinup girl for bookish sorts of men who date women," Diane Keaton, promoting her memoir Then Again (Random House, Nov.), said, "I’m going to slow it down a little. My book is sad." Indeed, Keaton was overcome at times discussing the memoir of her relationship with her mother, Dorothy Keaton, who died in 2008 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. Keaton warmly discussed her love for both her mother and father, Jack Hall, and how her mother’s "ordinary life" was such an inspiration to her. In particular, Keaton spoke of her mother’s lifetime of writing, which over the years chronicled daily life, then the death of her husband (“the document of Dad’s passing was her finest work”) to her Alzheimer’s stage, where paragraphs became sentences, then words, then numbers, "before silence." Keaton said that her mother was saying good-bye for 15 years, and, with Then Again, "I have written not my memoir, but ours."
Kaling stepped back to the podium and described the next author, Jeffrey Eugenides, as "a literary canary in my sexual coal mine, because if a guy has Middlesex on his shelf, then he’s probably okay." Eugenides’s forthcoming book was much the buzz at the show despite there being no galley (“I just finished it the book—yesterday,” Eugenides said); he observed, "I became a novelist because I never wanted to be up this early." He then launched into a rambling but fascinating explanation of the new book’s genesis. "I’d been working quietly on a novel for two years that was to end in a big debutante ball in Grosse Pointe, Mich.," he said. "Then, at Princeton, I decided to tell Edmund White what I was working on. Ed said, ‘Don’t do that.’ And Ed has been there." What Eugenides did was reapproach the story and quickly found himself with “150 pages” about a minor character, a young college student with literary ambitions. And that developed into The Marriage Plot (FSG, Oct.). Eugenides read the opening paragraph, and it was catnip to the assembled librarians and literary booksellers, as it described the woman’s collection of books—and by inference—her. He then went on to discuss how "marriage plots" are what 19th-century novels were all about, and he was interested in how a marriage plot would function two centuries later, with different standards and mores. "Pre-nups would have ruined Henry James," he offered.
Charlaine Harris closed out the breakfast and declined to talk much about her new book, Dead Reckoning (Ace Books), "since it’s the 11th book in the series" featuring Sookie Stackhouse, a bestselling franchise that is now a hit HBO series, True Blood. Instead, Harris talked about the three most important books that inform her writing today—Edgar Allan Poe’s Collected Stories, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. Harris, who began as a mystery writer, said, “I turned my career around by leaving mystery to mix genres—and Sookie took off.” Harris closed by saying how moved she was to see a “roomful of people who value the written word. It is we who have the power. We are extremely powerful. Go forth and sell more books.”
