The Dangers Of Planning Dinner With Your Heroes
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From time to time, best-selling novelist Joshilyn Jackson will play “The Imaginary Dinner Party” game with her friends. For the uninitiated, the game is simple: You pick three of your heroes, living or dead, whom you’d like to have over for a dinner party and postulate how it would turn out.
During her most recent engagement in the game, Jackson decided on Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee and Carol Churchill as her guests.
“But truthfully,” Jackson says, “I wouldn’t go to that party, even if I was the host.”
One reason Jackson gives for why she wouldn’t go is because she’s afraid to meet her heroes. She recalls when she was attending a book festival in Monroeville, Alabama and thought she kept crossing paths with Harper Lee. Whenever this happened, Jackson would hide in the bushes, quickly go into restrooms or turn at whatever corner was nearby. Turns out, it wasn’t Harper Lee after all.
Nonetheless, Jackson says she worries about how her heroes will reveal themselves to her; will they be crabby, smug, complacent, hateful or even human, she wonders. Similarly, Jackson worries about how they will perceive her; as flawed, fawning, gross or weird.
In order to avoid all of this potential discomfort, Jackson has come up with a plan.
“I invite those writers whose work has meant the most to me and they sit down to eat and I just listen,” she says. Perhaps, Jackson hopes, she could just be the waiter.
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