Dear Reader,
I did not expect Amor Towles to be wearing skinny jeans.
I don’t know what I expected Amor Towles to be wearing, but it wasn’t those.
Word Raccoon and I were watching a conversation between Towles and Ann Patchett on YouTube, and while I was completely absorbed by what Patchett was saying, some other part of my brain was apparently taking field notes on Amor Towles. For a poem, WR says.
He shifts in his seat, taps his left foot.
Forearms bared, sleeves rolled up. Pen and paper in hand.
He wears a watch but doesn’t consult it.
He nervously scratches under his leg.
When he speaks of the book’s structure, he opens his face out toward the audience for maybe the first time and touches the bridge of his glasses.
And:
Skinny jeans? To be fair, I am team skinny jeans for women, though that might make me sound sexist, LOL.
Certainly not. I just have preferences.
Maybe it was his watch with them, but skinny jeans, to me, call for a hoodie (ugh for any gender, IMO, at least without a zipper. Yes, WR has strong sartorial opinions. 😂), not a wristwatch.
I expected him to be about fifteen years older, too.
Which is ridiculous. I have access to the internet. I could have known what Amor Towles looks like, had I googled him.
But apparently the Amor Towles who wrote A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway had become someone else in my imagination.
And here was the actual human being.
Meanwhile, Ann Patchett was fascinating me.
At one point she admitted that she had originally planned to give the main character in Whistler a very different job. Then she spoke with someone who actually did that job and realized how complicated it would be to write about it.
But that wasn’t what she wanted the book to be about.
What she wanted to write about was the love she has for a dear friend.
I loved that.
Also, what she was wearing utterly charmed WR, who felt no reason to comment upon Patchett’s elegant ensemble except to note the lovely blue in her blouse and the comfy “dressy high-but-not-heels” shoes.
Interesting reversal, WR.
Patchett said that she began the novel after working on a draft of another novel that she knew was DOA. Then, with eight days “to herself,” she decided to give a new novel a try, and oh am I grateful. What a warm, steady book. It has plenty to challenge, but it never lapses into melodrama or self-pity. It is evenly told, in a way I wish more people would tell their backstories, in real life and not.
She also mentioned that she doesn’t own a cell phone. At one point she brought up a fact she thought she remembered hearing on NPR years ago, and Towles told her that everyone in the audience was going to Google it as soon as they left.
She said it hadn’t even occurred to her to do that.
The audience laughed.
And I felt as though I had learned something about her as a person.
That kept happening.
Also, before the conversation, actor Becky Ann Baker read from the opening of Patchett’s book and found so much humor in the pages that I wondered why I hadn’t heard it that way in my head. It felt obvious after hearing her just how funny the material was.
I already know some things about Ann Patchett, at least the author. (I’ve visited her bookstore, read all of her books), or at least I feel as though I do, but hearing someone else inhabit her words made me notice differently. I love that, WR!
Then there was the cover to Whistler.
Patchett talked about working with the artist who painted the portrait for The Dutch House. She is of the opinions that women on book covers should look directly at the viewer. Good for her!
For this one, she wanted the horse to look at us.
The artist had to point out that a horse’s eyes are on the sides of its head.
I mean.
There are limits even to artistic direction, Ms. Patchett. 😂
But I kept thinking about looking. (Sorry, this post is all over the place. Best I can do right now, LOL.)
Patchett looked out at the audience often as she answered questions. Towles sometimes looked down at his notes while she spoke. I noticed how rarely he looked out at us.
It didn’t strike me as discomfort. He seemed perfectly comfortable. Instead, I had the impression that he was intensely focused on Patchett, that he wanted to do right by her and her book during the conversation.
What fascinated me was seeing these two particular writers together who have both made me cry.
For different reasons, in different books, these two people have created things that have reached me.
And then there they were.
Two people sitting in chairs.
One of them looking at the audience.
One of them looking at his notes.
One of them without a cell phone.
One of them in skinny freakin’ jeans.
How do we reconcile the person with the work? Has anyone ever thought those things about me?
A book seems almost disembodied once it belongs to us; we carry it around in our heads. We forget (I forget) that all of it had to pass through one particular human mind and, eventually, through one particular pair of hands.
Then you see the hands.
And you think: These two mortals made all of those books I have spent hours with? And now these two pairs of hands are together onstage?
I found myself thinking about literary friendship, too. Towles and Patchett evidently know one another. There was something about watching two writers together that made me ache a little for more of that in my own life.
And yet writing requires solitude.
We want the room with the writers. There are particular writers from my MFA program who I know are one “lucky” break away from immortality. There is one writer in particular whose novels I will champion if I ever have the opportunity, unexpected flying geese and all!
But writers also need the room where nobody else is, maybe too often.
Anyway, Amor Towles was also wearing patterned socks. I kept looking at them because I could see that there was something on them, but I couldn’t make out what. For a while I thought they might be anchors.
And I actually thought, Dear God, don’t let them just be anchors. Let them be something fun or funny.
Apparently interrogating his skinny jeans was not enough for silly WR who is not at all superifical, but was probably protecting herself from the lump in her throat from seeing these two writers together.
I haven’t finished watching the conversation yet because life intervened.
When I do, WR and I may zoom in.
I’ve read his novels. I’ve cried over people he invented. I’ve spent hours inside worlds that came out of his imagination.
Surely I’m entitled to know what’s on the socks.
Right, WR?
In the meantime, we kinda want to read Whistler again.
Drema