Sometimes days don’t go as planned. And that’s perfectly okay. For instance, my husband and I went to the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday and had planned to attend three panel discussions. But since we didn’t eat breakfast and the first panel ended at 11:30 and the second one started at noon, we made an executive decision. Food!!
So, we only attended one panel yesterday but it was a good one. “Memoir: Live (and Laugh) Through This,” featured Lilibet Snellings, Pamela Ribon, Annabelle Gurwitch, and Anna David with Adrian Todd Zuniga moderating. Lots of good discussion about process and how to come to an idea of what a memoir is about. Snelling’s book was cited as an example. Since her memoir-self is contained in a box while writing (quite literally), it served as a nice example for how the other authors developed containments for their memoirs. What purpose does the collection of essays serve? What’s the overarching theme?
A bunch of good stuff, really.
Before the panel got started though, a woman with one of those unexplainably large heads sat down in front of me. It’s not that her head was actually larger than anyone else’s, but her posture and hair volume made it as such that I couldn’t see around her. So we shifted down the row one seat. A few minutes later, someone sat in front of this woman and she and her companion got up to leave shortly thereafter. Matt leaned into me and whispered, “Looks like she ran into her own big head problem,” and I laughed forever.
Then there was the guy that asked a question for all the poor men out there who aren’t empowered to speak freely in memoir — or something along those lines? It was definitely a “Oh noes, won’t someone think of the poor mens!” moment and I wondered if any of the panelists of “lady writers” were tempted to clock him. I certainly was!
And that brings me to perhaps my favorite part of the day: the crepes. Forgive me for not using the appropriate emphasis there. I’m lazy. In any case, there were a ton of food trucks at the book festival and after much back and forth, we decided to have crepes. Check out these maple braised pork beauties:
Add some herb garlic fries to the mix and the afternoon was complete.
We walked around and checked out some of the booths. One was dedicated to handcrafted leather books. I wanted to buy one so bad! But they cost all the monies. Alas, even if I did get one I’d probably panic about what to write in it and wait until I had the perfect idea and it would sit empty and sad on my bookshelf.
Since we’re old and lazy, all the walking wore us out so back home we went to pick up our daughter. She spent the morning and early afternoon digging in the dirt and helping to plant tomatoes with her grandparents:
I have no real nuggets of wisdom for you all today. Just a brief recap of our short stay among fellow book lovers.
Did you make it to the festival of books? If so, be sure to link to your posts about your experiences this past weekend or let me know all about them in the comments!