If you’re ever in L.A. in late April, be sure to make some time to tear it up with us at the Festival of Books. Okay, so there aren’t exactly literary mosh pits, but there should be. And I’m starting a petition, so there’s hope. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown of the most rockin’ authors I had a chance to see this year.

Frank McCourt:

The number one thing you learn listening to Frank McCourt is that cussing is much better with an Irish brogue. “Arse” is a funny word. And sounding like the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms commercial allows you to talk about unnatural relationships with goats and sing songs about stabbing babies with very few social consequences. Although the baby song got less of the funny sort of laugh and more of the uncomfortable sort of laugh.


Joan Didion:

When the interviewer reads passages from Ms. Didion’s work aloud, it makes all the other writers in the room want to throw themselves off the balcony. If I live to be a thousand years old, maybe I’ll get to write a sentence like that. Maybe.


Gore Vidal:

Gore Vidal is a man out of his time and place. In person, even in a wheel chair, he carries himself like royalty, and you find yourself responding to him that way.

He was interviewed by Arianna Huffington, someone nearly as famous as himself. But never has anyone on any stage been so out-shined as she was. His hatred of the Bush administration is well known. (Many of his other opinions which are much more controversial are also well know, but that’s another song for another day.) While Ms. Huffington said all the things the democrats are saying nowadays, he compared, contrasted and quoted at great length from memory Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln. He’s like the best college professor you never had.

Several weeks before, I’d read an interview he’d given with the L.A. Times, which left me with the impression that his health was so poor he might not make it until breakfast. And although he is largely wheelchair bound, (he was able to stand briefly with assistance to receive his second standing ovation) he did not seem quite so fragile. And whatever physical aliments he may have, you still leave with the impression that somehow his mind is working twice as fast as yours.



All in all, a smashing day at the festival, even without the mosh pits. Except, of course, for the lemonade. At four dollars, I better be able to put it in my gas tank and drive away on it.