In Person

Mentors and memoirs were the ideas, says Ann Beattie, for her newest novel, My Life, Starring Dara Falcon. Promotion of the book has brought Beattie, a literary icon of the early 1970s, to Austin for the first time, and to a crowd that welcomed her warmly. As Beattie told a packed third-floor audience at Book People, the idea for a pseudo-memoir came about in part because of the "memoir craze" that has drawn attention to authors such as Frank McCourt, Kathryn Harrison, and Mary Karr. Unlike their true stories, Beattie's goes beyond non-fiction, using the voice of her character Jean Warner in recounting her youth and her first mentor. What results is a coming-of-age story set in the Seventies, starring Warner's mentor Dara Falcon. The author of Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place, and Another You, Beattie began the night with the opening lines of My Life, Starring Dara Falcon: "I was stretched out on a lounge by the pool at a hotel in Key West when I found out the news about Dara Falcon...."
Beattie went on to say that writing was the only job she had ever held aside from teaching, and she hadn't taught since the late Seventies. Of her short stories, she says she writes fewer of them today and can never quite understand the logic behind the ones Norton chooses to anthologize in its collections. Alice Munro tops her list of writers she currently admires, and she says her writing routine, referred to as "disorganized," often involves many drafts as well as relying upon criticism from a group of about 15 friends. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, it is a process Beattie doesn't mind having to put there to take away. For both the avid reader and the neophyte writer, Beattie entertained, showing why she is considered one of the best at her craft. -- Jeremy Reed