Jhumpa Lahiri & Mavis Gallant – Granta Q&A

Check out this fascinating Granta Q&A of Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant at the Village Voice Bookshop.

Literary Q&As are fascinating events, not only because it’s a rare opportunity to experience a brief interaction with someone we feel we know, an almost-friend, but also because we find ourselves surrounded by strangers with their own claims to intimacy. However many hours these strange, eccentric interlopers have notched up crinkling fingers in the bathtub or squinting under late-night sheets, we remain certain that they could not possibly be the insightful, elegant readers we are. Surely we have a greater claim, a greater understanding, than they?

Eventually, the curtain lifts and empathy wafts across the room. All right, we say, taking a sniff. Perhaps these strangers have some right to be here. Perhaps they have suffered, wept, giggled as we have. But this disconnect, this shift from the private to the public as the curtain lifts, forces our expectations to change. Gone is the illusion of privacy, the serenity of minds meeting. We are no longer nestled under sheets or lolling in bathwater. We are bemused wallflowers at a well-attended orgy – naked, abandoned, reaching for our towels.

You might argue that Q&As and their accompanying readings really have nothing to do with writing or reading or literature or books, but are mostly acts of curiosity. “What does this writer look like naked?” we ask ourselves, which is to say, “who are they without their words?” More often than not, it’s hard to reconcile the fleshy form before us with the confident lover who’s whispered in our ear. However witty, self-assured, insightful a writer may be at a reading, they’re far more themselves on the page than in person.

Jhumpa Lahiri is fabulously self-composed, intelligent and insightful in this video, just as you might expect from the author of The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. In many ways authors – the real, actual people – are just like their books. But in the end, when the Q&A is over and we’re at home slipping back into our sheets, it’s the books we curl up with, for in most cases Q&As, like love affairs, are swiftly forgotten.

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