Slides That Follow Your Voice: US Northeast Accent Author Reading

Slide 1: The Night Shift at Dellwood

0:17Thank you, Marjorie, and thank you all for coming out. There are more people here than there were at my wedding, and about the same number of folding chairs, so, I mean, I feel at home. No? Okay. It was a small wedding. It's fine.

0:32The book is called The Night Shift at Dellwood, and I'm going to read you the first three pages, and then I'm going to stop, because my uh, my editor told me the first three pages are the only ones she didn't want to change, and I'd like to go out on a high. [chuckles]

Slide 2: The first three pages, and then I stop

0:49A little context. Dellwood is a diner on a state road about forty miles north of here, at a crossroads that stopped mattering in nineteen seventy, seventy-one when the interstate went through. It's not a real diner.

Slide 3: Dellwood

1:04It's about four real diners pushed together, and one of them was my grandmother's, where I washed dishes for two summers and learned everything I know about people from the night cook, who was called Teddy and who spoke perhaps thirty words a shift. Teddy, for the record, is also not real and also entirely real, and if any of his family are here tonight I'd ask them to wait till the signing to tell me what I got wrong. He'd have said nothing. He'd have said it loudly. I mean, you know the type. Anyway.

1:37The book is narrated by a woman named Lou, who has run the night shift at Dellwood for twenty-six years, and who is, on the night the book opens, about to serve her last customer. She doesn't know that yet. You do. I mean, you do now.

Slide 4: Open 24 hours

1:54Here we go. Hang on. I've lost the page. The, right. Okay.

2:02The sign out front says open twenty-four hours, and for a long time that was true, and now it is true in the way that most signs are true, which is that nobody has got around to changing it. Lou had closed the register at four ten and was counting the last of the ones when the bell over the door did what it does, and she said, without looking up, we are closed, hon, and the man said, I know, and sat down anyway, at the third stool, which had been Teddy's stool for nineteen years and which nobody had sat on since.

2:37She looked up then. He was maybe sixty. He had a coat that had been expensive once and a face that had been expensive once, and he put both hands flat on the counter the way a man does when he wants you to see that he is not holding anything.

Slide 5: The third stool

2:54She poured him a coffee, because that is what you do, and because she had already made it. He said, you don't remember me. She said, I remember everybody, give me a minute.

3:06And she did, in the end, but it took longer than a minute, it took longer than a minute, and by the time she got there the sun was coming up over the gas station across the road and the book was, more or less, over.

3:21That's where I'll stop, because the rest is the minute, and it took me four years to write it. [sighs]

Slide 6: The rest is the minute

3:29People, I get asked, people ask... People ask whether Lou is my grandmother. She isn't. My grandmother would have thrown him out. [laughs]

Slide 7: Is Lou my grandmother?

3:39Lou is the person I wished I could be at four in the morning, seventeen and exhausted, when somebody walked in carrying something heavy, and I wasn't her yet. I don't know if that makes sense. It's the closest I can get.

3:54My grandmother did, once, let a man stay. He had a dog in the truck and it was February. She gave the dog eggs. She gave the man nothing, but she let him sit. And I was going to say that's in the book, and I, it is, somewhere. I think. I wrote it a while ago.

4:14I'll take questions, I'll sign anything that holds still, and Marjorie tells me there's wine, which I didn't know, and which changes my feelings about the questions. Red or white, Marjorie? Both. Okay. Thank you.