Funny note on Does the author go as deep as we do

Last year I attended Southwestern University in Georgetown. Every year SU invites a famous author to come and speak, and last year it was Amy Tan. She was wonderful! Amy Tan has a great sense of humor, and she is incredibly humble. One of the first stories she told was about one time when she was in a book store to do a book signing. She was waiting in a back room of the book store and she noticed a shelf with all of the Spark Notes books on it. Absent mindedly she looked over the titles, and then her eyes came across a title all too familiar, The Joy Luck Club, and her first thought was "But I'm not dead yet!" So she picked up the Spark Notes book and began reading. She noted that the biography was slightly embellished, but she didn’t mind because they way they made it sound was much more interesting. Then she told us how she flipped through the section where it breaks down specific words and themes that the author uses in their writing. She read to us (from Spark Notes) some of the central metaphors that are apparent throughout her work and her intended meaning. Then she said "WOW, I am good!" she told us how she kept reading just because she wanted to know what other elaborate metaphors and symbols she had created and what they mean. I wish I could capture for ya'll just how hilarious her speech was, particularly this part. So, this just goes to show that Spark Notes, and all of us for that matter, can read way more into a text than the author ever intended or imagined.

1 comments:

  CMcLeod

September 17, 2008 at 9:33 AM

Hey, I was at that too. She was fantastic!