Meeting Your Writing Heroes
Is it all you expected?
We read their books and fall in love. We see their fame in the world and it has such power to thrill us. But do we do ourselves, or them, any favors when we slip into being fans? I wonder if we lose proper perspective.
I am going to share my experience with being face to face with a famous writer, Madeleine L’Engle. This is a writer whose every book I had made a point of reading, going far beyond her famous children’s books, to read her adult novels, and all of her personal memoirs.
I met Madeleine L’Engle in the spring of 1990, at a very crowded book signing hosted by The Red Balloon bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota. It is an occasion most notable for what I did not get out of it.
What I did not achieve was the impossible, under the circumstances. I did not make a real, personal, human connection with the woman whose words had already touched me so intimately.
You see, there is an illusion in the private realm that exists in the space between a reader and a book. If we love the book and treasure its words, we may fancy we really know the person who wrote and shaped those words. Because they speak so clearly, so deeply, to us. Directly to us, it sometimes feels.
Of course, we don’t know the writer at all. And no matter how we yearn to connect with them, we probably never will. Except through their words on the page.
That day I waited in a very hot, long, slow line, crowded into a fairly small space with a lot of human flesh, waiting for my chance to pause briefly before the table where she sat. And what I found when standing before her was what we find at most book signing events.
Very real, tangible, and both visible and invisible barriers to keep me in my place and Ms. L’Engle safely in hers. A bookstore woman performed the task of making the necessary (and vaguely implied unpleasant and burdensome) human contact. All designed of course to keep things moving along, and I am not criticizing, simply noting my emotional reactions.
I was asked which books I wanted to have signed and what name should be inscribed, which was noted on post-it notes, which then were stuck on each book and passed to the author.
The author, Ms. L’Engle, held herself in complete reserve, throwing me one look and swiftly inscribing a “personal message” in each of my two books. (Again not a criticism. I can only imagine her fatigue, and if she was introverted as many writers are, how trying all these public appearances were.)
Being starstruck, I stammered out some heartfelt and inane comment about how much I enjoyed her writings. My remark was met with silence, perhaps disinterest, perhaps even a vague sense of annoyance on her part. My impressions were no doubt colored by my own insecurities and nerves upon meeting a Famous Person whom I revered.
Perhaps a writer, who spends so very much time and energy in creative solitude, feels all too vulnerable when faced with the needs of so many strangers who want to connect with her. I wonder if it feels as if she risks all her energy and her human capacity for empathy being siphoned off by so many seeking to drink from the well of her spirit.
It is all so understandable, and yet, I came away feeling almost rebuked and certainly lonelier in a deeper way than I could have predicted. Because I had just had a cold dunking reality. The realm of illusion that exists in the space between a reader and a book does not fare well in the real world.
Perhaps it is about expectations and holding unrealistic hopes for more than can be given. This experience certainly never stopped me from going to future book signings, nor finding pleasure in seeing, in person, the writers whose work I love. I learned from that experience.
I learned to temper my expectations with more realism and more empathy for how difficult the business side of things, like touring and book signings, can be for creative people.
I learned to moderate my wishes to connect and simply enjoy whatever brief interaction could happen. I learned it is enough to simply say ‘thank you for your wonderful writing’. I save my adulation and hero worship for the privacy of that space between me the reader and the marvelous book.
