What I found most fascinating about the Tayari Jones reading was not her reading but Tayari Jones herself. Her reading was fantastic, don't get me wrong - the flow was superb and the dialogue was some of the most natural dialogue I've heard - but Tayari Jones herself far outshadowed her own work.
It was after she finished reading, when she was taking questions from the audience, that I really started to become interested. Her humor, her tone, her answers - they were fascinating. From the way she immediately jumped into her reading with barely any self-introduction, I was not expecting her to have such a casual, humorous personality. I lost track of the number of times she made the audience laugh (her recollection about the "damn good knife" her father bought her mother still makes me smile as I write this). Perhaps more importantly, however, were her actual answers. She answered each one with honesty and deftness, telling us about how she comes up with her dialogue, how symbolism is innate to a work, how nobody around you will ever read a novel you wrote but they'll sure damn say they did and proudly display the book in their homes. Tayari Jones herself was much more alive than any of the characters she wrote.
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