Repeat the ‘up early’, the even longer lines, the even greater distances traveled, but oh, what a payback!
The first photo is of Larry McMurtry and his writing partner, Diana Ossana. We were among the last allowed into a huge auditorium seating 700. Susie had waited in line over an hour to save a spot for Ronnie and also made special arrangements for hearing accommodations for him. She then had to leave because there were no seats left. The ultimate bummer was that McMurtry mumbled for the entire hour and Ronnie’s equipment malfunctioned. He heard virtually nothing.
We lucked out and were able to see Lisa See. She doesn’t look 1/2 Chinese, but really is. Her sessions were so popular that people lined up hours before and threaded out of the building and around the block. No chance for the vast majority of those folks to get in, but they waited ‘just in case’. She told us in reading a book, she always reads the last chapter, then the first, then the next-to-the-last, second, etc. She eventually gets the narrative, but her overwhelming interest is how the book is structured and WHEN events are introduced. Fascinating.
Gregory McNamee, the guy with the old lady hairdo, was one of the lesser-known authors who presented with Jeff Biggers (who got so passionate about his subject that he jumped up on a lab table in the amphitheater and screamed part of his delivery!). The third author in this session was Margot Mifflin. Their common theme was: Forgotten Lives: Uncovering Hidden Histories. It was a knock-out…much better than McMurtry.