Lauren Berlant, standing in tree pose, replied to a particularly long winded question after a keynote they’d given: There are only two kinds of questions; am I right or are you my mother? It was maybe the best thing I’d ever seen at a conference.
Once I [Louise Erdrich] was in a bookstore in New York and a very short man reached up and patted me on the top of my head and said, “I think you’re a good little writer.” So I patted him on the head and said, “Thank you. You’re a good little reader.”
Years ago at an MLA conference I saw a young man, a graduate student, read a paper on one of Ursula Le Guin’s science-fiction novels. After he had finished and it was time for discussion, a handsome, middle-aged woman at the back of the room rose and said emphatically, “You’re wrong. I didn’t.” It was Le Guin.
In 1979, her harsh review of Woody Allen’s Manhattan received a sharp, 654-word retort from John Romano, then an English professor at Columbia. Didion’s reply to his reply? “Oh, wow.”