If Jennifer Weiner comes you your town on her book tour (or for any other reason), you MUST go see her. She is a riot! She is a great storyteller with great stories to tell she is an admitted pottymouth, tho’, and was a little mortified that there was a kid in the second row. “Earmuffs!” she kept saying to the girl’s mom.
Jennifer Weiner at the Phildelphia Free Library 7.15.09
She talked about a lot of things, including:
- You have to spin the straw of life into the gold of fiction.
- People who are bad don’t see themselves as bad so they don’t recognize themselves in the book. If they ask, “Is that me?” say, “Why would you think that?” 😉
- People who write well go to law school. And then they try to slip jokes in their briefs. That doesn’t work so well.
- Kate Gosselin’s haircut is called the reverse mullet: long in front, short in back.
Random, I know, but every time she said something witty (reverse mullet) or profound (straw into gold), I whipped out my BlackBerry to type it out in a note. (Hey, usually I bring paper, but I’ve gone high tech.)
Then she read to us from her new book, Best Friends Forever. She lamented over how to cover looks like a douche commercial (“Do you ever get that not-so-fresh feeling?”) and how the one girl looks like she’s picking a wedgie. Like I said, funny lady. The book is good, too!
After her book talk, we went upstairs to get her autograph. The line was way long, mostly because I had insisted we sit near the stage in the auditorium which meant we were one of the last to get out, oh well! When we ginally got to the front of the line, we were talking about Facebook and how to changethe privacy settings so people can’t read your statuses or wall posts. She overheard us and said, “HOW DO YOU DO THAT!” I got a little flustered as I had done it only twice before (sorry, aunties), and I had been planning to ask her if she had any advice for finding a literary agent. She was most thankful to find out you can block people (though why accept them in the first place?), and as we left we joked that I could email her my question and say, “Remember, I’m the one who helped you with your Facebook settings?” 😉
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