CelebriTea Authors Dish

     What do you get when you invite four accomplished authors for tea? Stimulating conversation was on the menu at the New Rochelle Public Library Foundation’s annual “CelebriTea” on Sunday, April 22^nd. Panelists included Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker, award-winning music critic David Hajdu and Brian Cronin, a blogger with a fresh take on comic books. New York Times columnist Kate Stone Lombardi – herself in the news for her recent book The Mama’s Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes The Stronger – acted as emcee, weaving the authors’ experience into a coherent discussion that kept attendees riveted. The CelebriTea was held at the New Rochelle Public Library, with more than 80 supporters buying tickets to hear the authors’ candid conversation about their craft.

     Talking about the challenge of writing biography, and whether a writer can ever really know his subject, David Hajdu said that writers must be selective in their choice of details, so that creating a good biography is akin to “portraiture. If you want to be God, be Norman Mailer.”

     Hajdu conceded that he chooses subjects unlike himself. “I don’t write what I know, I write about people I want to know,” he said. “I’m selfish and greedy and I want to learn something new. I’m not trained as an historian, but as a journalist, so if the story is familiar to me I’m not interested in it.” Cronin agreed: "I write about what interests me -- what do I want to know? If I want to know it, I figure other people will be interested too. Maybe that is just hubris."

      The authors admitted  their choice of topics often reveals a lot about themselves. “When you write about mothers and sons everybody wants to ask you about the Oedpius complex!” joked Lombardi, author of The Mama’s Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger. "People see things in what I wrote that I didn't even know I was writing about." Hajdu agreed, saying that one of the hazards of writing biography is how much it reveals about the author. For example, he said, although one of his subjects, Billy Strayhorn, was “a gay, African American jazz composer of the 1940s, and yet when I gave the book to my mother-in-law she said “My God, it’s all about you”.”

     All four authors joined in praising the uniquely American institution that is the public library. Hajdu recalled that “[Billy] Strayhorn saw the library as a sacred place in which he could blossom intellectually, a place of ideas unlike his home.” Hajdu revealed that he felt the same way: “I grew up in a steel town, and I followed the lead of my brother, who would skip school to go to the library. It was a door to another world -- a way out… I owe my professional life to libraries.”

   Baker said that libraries offered her a way into the heart of Maryam Jameelah (nee Margaret Marcus in Larchmont, NY), the subject of her book The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism: “The Larchmont Public Library is where Maryam discovered Islam, and it changed her life.” Baker found the New York Public Library essential to her research, adding “ And then there’s another library in Lahore, Pakistan with the archives of the man who invited Maryam to live with him as his daughter.”

     Funds raised by the CelebriTea support the New Rochelle Public Library Foundation, a volunteer fundraising and advocacy organization which undertakes varied activities to ensure the future well-being of the library and provides support for initiatives that enhance opportunities for learning, exploration and public discourse. For more information visit www.nrplfoundation.org.