Merely eight days after my return from this year’s San Diego Comic Con, I attended an event that outdid any of the presentations in the convention’s Hall H, an occasion that the Con is unlikely ever to duplicate, and it was right here in my home base of New York City.

On August 2, 2006, I attended An Evening with Harry, Carrie and Garp at Radio City Music Hall. This was the second of two nights of readings, performed on behalf of charities, by three best-selling novelists. And just who in the literary world could pack a venue the size of Radio City Music Hall? There was John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and nine other novels. There was the organizer, Stephen King, the modern master of horror. I do not know how often Irving makes public appearances, but King has become a familiar face in New York, appearing at the New Yorker Festival and this season at Manhattan’s Symphony Space. But the third author lives in Britain, rarely makes public appearances and had not visited the United States in six years: J. K. Rowling, writer of the Harry Potter series. I never expected to see her in person, but I did at Radio City Music Hall that night.

The usually ubiquitous Beat was aghast that I succeeded in attending when she did not. I was surprised myself at how easy it was to get in: I merely stopped by a Ticketmaster outlet two nights before. But on the night I attended, the Music Hall did indeed look sold out, as far as I could tell.

King came up with the idea for the two “Evenings” were and invited Irving and Rowling to join him. King selected one of the charities that would benefit, the Haven Foundation, which aids writers and performing artists who are prevented from working by serious illness or injury. Rowling chose the other charity, Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian organization that provides medical aid worldwide. At a press conference King said he hoped the two nights would raise a quarter of a million dollars for each charity.

I wondered how Rowling reacted to flying across the ocean to arrive in New York City in the midst of one of this summer’s unusually intense heat waves, with heat indexes of one hundred degrees or more during her stay. When I arrived at Radio City Music Hall in the early evening of August 2, the weather was reasonably endurable, and the building’s air conditioning quickly put me at ease.

The show began with a welcoming speech by actress Whoopi Goldberg, who got off to a bad start by making the common error of mispronouncing Rowling’s name. (It doesn’t rhyme with “howling,” though that might seem appropriate, but with “bowling.” Since this was the second night she had given the speech, you’d think someone might have corrected her beforehand.) Nonetheless, it was an entertaining speech, in which Goldberg declared that “These three writers are forces of nature equal to or greater than any of the supernatural events you can find in their books.” Goldberg commented that “somebody should have put them all together a long time ago. Because. . .if that little wimpy boy [Harry?] had asked that poor girl [definitely King’s Carrie] to the prom, it would have stopped a whole lot of crying.”

Goldberg noted the large contingents of fans for Irving, King, and Rowling who were present in the audience. “There are plenty of J. K. Rowling fans here tonight,” Goldberg said, “and I think I know why they’re screaming,” as indeed they were., “It’s because all of the Stephen King fans are whispering to them all of the ways that Harry could possibly die.” As for those King fans, Goldberg maintained that “we hardly ever get together because so many of us are angry loners.” (Neither angry nor alone, the audience appreciatively laughed.)

Goldberg introduced the next celebrity, who was in turn to introduce King. It was Tim Robbins, who played the lead in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the film adaptation of King’s prison story, Appropriately, Robbins wore a striped shirt and pants that evoked prison garb. Among the celebrities making introductory speeches that night, Robbins was far and away the best, thanks to his running gag. Observing that the movie’s “title has been a source of confusion for its many fans,” Robbins proceeded to mispronounce it every time the name turned up in his speech, and each time more elaborately (e. g. “Shankshaw Redaction,” “Shinkshank Reduction”). You might think this would become tiresome, but the gag instead kept building in impact on the audience, and prevented Robbins’ speech from becoming mired in the expected tributes to King’s authorial prowess.

After each author was introduced, there was a brief overview of his or her life and work shown on the videoscreens hanging over the stage, including clips from films adapted from the author’s books. I noted that in King’s case there was no excerpt from perhaps the best known film adaptation of his work, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which King is on record as detesting.

Then each author would come out and read from a miniature set that was apparently designed to evoke his or her work. King got to sit on a replica of a backwoods back porch, although he soon became restless and moved about the stage.

The three authors exemplified the dress code that I witnessed at the Eisner awards at the San Diego Con: the women dress up, and the men dress down.
King represented one end of the evening’s fashion spectrum, wearing a blue sweatshirt, looking as casual as could be without slipping over into sloppiness.

King began by thanking the audience for their hearty applause. “I think all the muggles are home tonight watching TV. The real people are here.” Damn straight. Then he looked warily at the chair. “You don’t think this thing’s electrified, do you?”

King told us, “Well, so that was a really nice introduction, and people said very nice things, and now I think I’ll read a really gross story. Because it’s what I do. Hope you enjoyed your supper because you may not for long.”

King chose to read “The Revenge of Lardass Hogan” from his novella The Body, which was adapted into the movie Stand by Me (1986). “Revenge” is about a small town pie-eating contest for which which the title character prepares by drinking a bottle of castor oil. During the contest, once Hogan has devoured enough pie, he starts to throw up, inducing an epidemic of vomiting from everyone (and on everyone) present, ending in Hogan’s triumph: tying with his chief competitor.

King gave a bravura performance, at one point interrupting the story to exult, “I actually get paid for writing this stuff!” Listening to the tale, I realized that this was a comedic variation on the notorious prom scene from King’s Carrie: the protagonist uses his or her special talents to wreak grotesque havoc on a gathering of the community that have treated him or her as an underdog.

King was followed by actor Stanley Tucci, who gave a serious and perhaps too formal speech introducing John Irving. I had expected that the KIng and Rowling fans would overwhelmingly outnumber any Irving readers who had shown up, so I was surprised by the widespread, enthusiastic applause that greeted his entrance. Irving represented the middle of the evening’s fashion spectrum, in an open-necked shirt and white pants, seated in a comfy chair in a set with a lamp, old, bound volumes, and ornate fireplace, that suggested a prosperous man’s study.

Irving read a sequence from his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, dealing with an annual Christmas pageant, for which the title character, an undersized schoolboy with a high-pitched voice, is usually sentenced to play an angel, ignominiously suspended above the stage; Owen, however, is determined to play the starring role, that of the infant Jesus, even though that role is assigned to actual babies.

This was definitely the best of the three readings. Like King’s story, Irving’s passage kept building in comedic impact as it proceeded. Moreover, Irving, who has been a wrestler as well as an author, assumed a falsetto voice for Owen’s dialogue, which added to the hilarity, being utterly incongruous with Irving’s physique. Irving even broke himself up a few times during the reader, much to the audience’s delight. Oh, and by the way, Irving’s reading also contained a reference to vomiting, the evening’s unexpected recurring motif.

The next introductory speech was made by Kathy Bates, who received a rousing welcome from the audience: the King fans know her as the star of the 1990 film adaptation of his book Misery. She had introduced King the night before; tonight she was there to introduce Rowling, who had been introduced on Tuesday by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.

“Tonight,” Bates began, “our next author makes her much-anticipated return to the United States, the first visit in six years. And that’s why at this moment I feel like Ed Sullivan when he was about to introduce the Beatles. Some of you kids be sure to ask your parents what I’m talking about in the way home. The Beatles were in a band called Wings.” Well, actually, anyone who grew up after the 1970s isn’t going to get that joke, either. Time passes more quickly than we may like to think. Describing the passion for Rowling’s work as “Pottermania,” Baker went on to praise her books for fostering a new generation’s enthusiasm for reading “just when it seemed that technology had infiltrated every last aspect of our lives. . . .” Baker summed up, “With words on a page, J. K. Rowling lured kids away from the screens and into the quiet of their rooms and took them to places where Google does not go.”

Then there was a video overview of Rowling’s career, some of which was drawn from the BBC special Harry Potter and Me, which was repackaged in the United States as an episode of A & E’s Biography. The audience stirred when the onscreen Rowling showed the BBC interviewer the folder which contained the final chapter of the final Harry Potter book. When the face of Alan Rickman as Professor Snape flashed onto the screen, the audience applauded. Since I’ve always thought of Snape as the archetypal nasty teacher, this reaction surprised me. I had no idea he had so many supporters, and Rowling seemed taken aback by the audience’s response to him, too.

Then Rowling came onstage, displaying a fashion sense that decidedly showed up the men’s. With her long blonde hair, wearing a little black dress, and responding to the enormous applause with a brilliant smile, she cut a very striking figure onstage. Her set consisted of a large chair, resembling a throne, standing between a small table, atop which was a Japanese-style fan, and a tall lampstand, holding a candelabra-like arrangement of lights at the top. The scene evoked a British castle, perhaps Hogwarts itself.

Someone shouted out, “Don’t kill Harry!” “No pressure there,” said Rowling, sounding pressured indeed. “I feel slightly like I’m Herman’s Hermits having to go on after the Stones and the Beatles.” (My gosh, not only won’t kids in the audience get that reference, but Rowling herself is too young to remember Herman’s Hermits in their mid-1960s heyday!) The audience, the press, and even King and Irving may have considered Rowling to be the star of the show, but she seems to have considered the two veteran writers her superiors.

She continued, “My consolation is I have the most interesting shoes.” It turns out that she used the same line the night before, so the video cameramen were ready. An enormous close-up of Rowling’s feet appeared on the videoscreens, and she had on these high-heeled silver sandals with serpent-like straps. She was right to be pleased.

“I notice you like Snape,” Rowling observed in an amused tone. Then she said she would do a reading from the most recent of her books, last year’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Those of you who have not read this book hereby receive a spoiler warning.) After that, she said, she would take some questions inasmuch as “in my experience my readers like me to answer questions and like me to hasten on to that part. . . .” In this particular sequence from the book, “Harry goes back in time and watches as Albus Dumbledore,” his mentor, “goes to inform another famous pupil of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that he has a place at the school.” The audience cheered at her reference to Tom Riddle, who would become the Potter books’ archvillain, Lord Voldemort. “And you really shouldn’t be cheering that particular one,” she responded. “Snape I can kind of see. . . .”
(But only “kind of,” you’ll note.)

Rowling’s reading went decently enough, and she even successfully essayed a lower class voice for a female character. But King and Irving had selected pieces that were brilliant comedy set pieces, and gave them tour de force performances. Rowling’s selection instead dealt in a quietly ominous mood, and, since she only rarely makes public appearances, she is presumably less practiced at doing such performances of her work.

Upon concluding her reading, Rowling dryly remarked that “nobody told me the theme of the readings was to be vomit. So I could have done something with the puking pastilles, but. . .I didn’t know.” And then she turned to questions from the audience.

The first question came from a girl who identified herself as Christina, a thirteen-year-old from Staten Island. She wanted to know, “If you could bring one Harry Potter character to life, other than Harry, who would it be?”

“Personally,” Rowling began, “although it’s a really tricky one: Hagrid, if I could have anyone.” The audience applauded the choice of Harry’s gigantic friend. “Because I think. . .we’d all like a Hagrid in our life, liability though he often is. . . . It would be really great if I met a fundamentalist Christian,” Rowling said, clearly referring to those parties who claim the Harry Potter books advocate satanism, “to say, ‘Would you like to discuss the matter with Hagrid?’”

The next questioner was an eighteen-year-old New Yorker who pointed out that in the most recent Potter book, Harry’s “Aunt Petunia is said to be oddly flushed when Dumbledore announces that Harry will be returning only once more to Privet Drive,” where she lives. “Does this mean that Aunt Petunia harbors a hidden love or fondness for Harry and the connection he provides her to the wizarding world?”

“That’s an excellent question,” replied Rowling, perhaps playing for time while she mulled over her answer. “And like all the best and most penetrating questions, it’s difficult to answer. But I will say this. There is a little more to Aunt Petunia than meets the eye and you will find out what that is in Book Seven.” At this the audience clapped and roared in excitement. They were present when J. K. herself had granted that rarest of valuables: a hint about what happens in the next book! (But what I want to know is, did she name Harry’s Aunt Petunia after Ben Grimm’s Aunt Petunia in Fantastic Four?)

That small hint, though, had not sated the audience’s appetite to know more.
Questioner #3 was a boy from New Jersey who gave his age as nine, enthused over the Harry Potter books, and then dropped a bombshell. Bringing up Dumbledore, the boy asked, “Since he is the most powerful wizard of all time and Harry Potter is so loyal to him, how could he really be dead?” The audience applauded and cheered, but Rowling buried her head in her hands and groaned. This very private writer was now having to answer to her readers en masse–including a small child–for the apparent death of a beloved character. “I feel terrible,” she said. “The British writer Graham Greene once said that every writer had to have a chip of ice in their heart,” she began to explain, but then dismay took over. “Oh, no,” she said, “I think you may just have ruined my career.”

“I really can’t answer that question because the answer is in Book Seven, but you shouldn’t expect Dumbledore to do a Gandalf. Let me just put it that way,” she said. I now wonder if this nine-year-old would have understood this reference to the wizard of Lord of the Rings who literally undergoes the traditional mythic device of death and resurrection. I had myself wondered if Dumbledore would “do a Gandalf,” but now it seems not. “I’m sorry,” she told the boy. But Rowling wasn’t out of the woods on the Dumbledore matter yet.

The next in line were a boy and his father, and you might expect that the boy was going to ask the question, but you would be wrong: the father did all the talking, and looked strangely familiar. “Hello,” said the father, “We are Salman and Milan Rushdie,” whereupon the audience burst into applause for the famous author. Not so very long ago, Rushdie was marked for death by Muslim fanatics and could not possibly have appeared in a huge public venue like Radio City Music Hall.

“I’m not sure this is fair, Salman,” said Rowling, seriously. “I think you might be better at guessing plots than most.” Rushdie, indeed, writes children’s fantasy himself, such as Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and did a book on MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) for the British Film Institute.

Following the precedent set by the previous questioners, the elder Rushdie stated, “We are nine and fifty-nine.” He explained, “And this is really Milan’s question and it’s kind of a follow-up to the previous one.”

“All right, okay,” conceded Rowling, unable to escape the trap.

“Until the events of Volume 6,” Rushdie began, “it was always made plain that Snape might have been an unlikable fellow, but he was essentially one of the good guys.” The audience audibly agreed.

“I can see this is the question you all really want answered,” observed Rowling, vastly outnumbered.

“Dumbledore himself had always vouched for him,” Rushdie pointed out, like a debater marshaling his evidence.

“Yes,” agreed Rowling.

“Now we are suddenly told that Snape is a villain and Dumbledore’s killer,” asserted Rushdie. “We cannot, or don’t want to believe this. Our theory is that Snape is, in fact, still a good guy.” The audience applauded, as if Rushdie were Snape’s attorney, mounting his defense. “From which it follows that Dumbledore can’t really be dead,” Rushdie argued, “and that the death is a ruse cooked up between Dumbledore and Snape to put Voldemort off his guard, so that when Harry and Voldemort come face to face, Harry may have more allies than he or Voldemort suspects.” (This thought had occurred to me, too, when I read the book.) “So,” Rushdie summed up, delivering his coup de grace, “is Snape good or bad? In our opinion everything follows from it,” presumably meaning that if Snape is good, then Dumbledore lives.

Rushdie had said all this in a perfectly reasonable tone, without raising his voice, but the audience was nonetheless aroused, reacting with laughter and applause. One account of the evening claims that Rowling “chuckled” but from my vantage point I detected no sign of this. She was on the spot.

Instead, she replied quite cautiously, “Well, Salman, your opinion, I would say, is. . .right.” His opinion about what? That Snape is a good guy? If so, I’m surprised that Harry Potter fans haven’t made a greater fuss about this revelation. Or was his opinion that “everything follows” from the answer to whether or not Snape is a good guy?

Rowling then asserted, “But I see that I need to be a little more explicit and say that Dumbledore is definitely dead.” Both apologetically and defensively, she noted that “I do know that there is an entire website out there [named] DumbledoreIsNot Dead.com, so I’d imagine they’re not pretty happy right now.” Concerned, Rowling continued, “But I think. . .all of you need to move through the five stages of grief, and I’m just helping you get past denial.” Perhaps due to nervousness, she added, “I can’t remember what’s next” in the five stages. “It may be anger so I think we should stop it here. Thank you,” she bid the Rushdies, and the audience applauded.

Perhaps it was a relief for her that the time had come in the program for her to bring King and Irving back onstage to join her in taking further questions. Then King introduced Soledad O’Brien of CNN’s American Morning, who acted as moderator. She explained that over 1,000 questions had been submitted (via e-mail from ticket holders), from which twelve had been chosen. “The lucky dozen” questioners had been seated close to the stage and hence to the microphones; four of them had been the questioners during Rowling’s solo segment.

This was clever. The organizers knew that there would be more questions for Rowling than for King and Irving, so she got to take four before the men joined her onstage. Moreover, it’s clear that someone had carefully selected the questions. Salman Rushdie didn’t get picked by sheer chance. There were neither stupid questions nor the sort of embarrassing social misfits one sees in San Diego question lines. The San Diego Con and other conventions could learn from this event’s example.

The first questioner, a man from Alabama, asked. “Mr. King, do the contents of your head ever just scare the crap out of you?”

“No,” replied King: “I pass the savings on to you.” After the audience’s laughter subsided, King went on, “I’ve said this before: there are people out there that pay a psychiatrist, you know, ninety dollars an hour, they only get a fifty minute hour, and those guys take all of August off and they go somewhere it’s cool.” (There was an obvious reference to our heat wave.) King continued, “I vent the same terrible feelings of fear and inadequacy and phobic reactions, and people pay me. It’s a great way to live, man,” King concluded to applause.

Next came a woman from Connecticut who asked John Irving if he would describe any other sources for “events or characters” in A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Irving replied that “I’m a very slow processor with those things that have affected me personally or emotionally. . . .If Owen Meany is, it’s fair to say. . .my Vietnam novel, it was written twenty years after the war. . . . And I wrote my most autobiographical novel about my childhood and my adolescence most recently, when I was already in my late 50s and early 60s. I work better by waiting,” he concluded. in other words, he gains perspective with the passage of time.

As for the origin of Owen Meany, Irving said that when he was “back in my home town” one Christmas he got together with “two or three friends that, in some cases, I hadn’t seen since they were eight or nine or ten years old,” and they started discussing their friends who had either died in Vietnam or who had “thoroughly altered the course of their lives” through the steps they took “not to go.”

One of his friends mentioned a name that Irving did not recognize. “They said to me, ‘Well, in Sunday school you used to pick him up by his ankles and shake him until all of the money fell out of his pants.’ And then I remembered this very little boy who was smaller than all of us. And we loved him but we liked to infuriate him because he had a voice like this,” Irving said, shifting back into Owen’s falsetto, “and we’d love to hear him get mad., He was so small that whenever you were around him you just had to pick him up, which he hated.”

Then, Irving related, “I said one of the stupidest things I’d ever said in my life. I said to my friends, ‘Oh, he couldn’t have gone to Vietnam. He’s too small,’ having last seen him at the age of eight. And one of my closest friends said, ‘You moron, he probably grew!’” After the audience stopped laughing, Irving went on, “I went home and thought, what if he didn’t grow?. . .And that became Owen Meany.”

As a victim of bullying myself as a child, I wondered about Irving’s claim that he “loved” this boy that, by his own admission, he and his friends would bully and manhandle. With time comes maturity and perspective, and Irving turned this unnamed boy into a sympathetic central figure in his book. But is there still an element of condescension and mockery in the way that Irving imitates Owen’s high-pitched voice? And did we in the audience share that attitude by laughing at that imitation?

The next question was from a librarian from Pennsylvania who began by telling Rowling, “thank you for attracting so many students and adults as well to reading.” (Now there is something a little disturbing. It’s well known that Rowling’s books have inspired kids to become readers, but one might have hoped that people would have picked up the reading habit by the time they became adults.) The librarian wanted to know what Rowling would be writing after the final Harry Potter book.

Perhaps previous questions had put Rowling on guard, because she began, “I thought you were going to attack me for Madam Pince, and I would like to apologize to you and any other librarians present here today.” She explained that “if they’d”–her heroes–”had a pleasant, helpful librarian, half my plots would be gone. Because the answer invariably is in a book but Hermione has to go and find it. If they’d had a good librarian, that would gave been that problem solved. So, sorry.” Gosh, this is becoming J. K. Rowling’s penance tour of New York.

Then Rowling said upon completing the last Potter novel, she may go back to working on a shorter book “for I think slightly younger children that’s half-written.” But that won’t be soon. “I think I’ll need a short mourning period, though. You have to allow me to get past Harry.”

A woman from Milwaukee said that her mother, who lives in Maine, says that King has been “a tremendous contributor to the community” in Bangor and that the townspeople treat him as “a regular Mainer,” and asked King how he “managed” to do this.

“I’m just a regular guy, that’s all,” King replied (unlikely as that may seem). King explained that “if [people] only see you on a stage at Radio City Music Hall. . .for one night you get to be a big deal, but I’ll tell you something. . . Saturday I’m going to be home and my wife’s going to be there and she’s going to say, ‘Walk the dog and empty the dishwasher.’ And immediately your feet go back on the floor where you are.”

King continued, “We’ve lived in Bangor since 1979, which means we have one other set of neighbors on the street who have lived there longer than we have, but they’re senile and they don’t remember us, so that almost doesn’t matter anymore.”

King observed, “So we’ve been around. People know us. They’ve gotten used to us.” He noted that “they say familiarity breeds contempt, and before it breeds contempt, it breeds neighborliness, and that’s the nice thing about living in a small town.”

He went on, “We live in a neighborhood. We have an ice cream parlor around one corner and a forest around the other corner. . .It’s like the village that you write about in the Harry Potter books,” King told Rowling, “and it’s like the towns that John writes about in a lot of the New England settings in his books, and it’s great.” So there is a link among these three writers that I had not previously considered: they share an affinity for chronicling small town life.

A man from New York wanted to know if Irving would like to write a sequel about any of his characters.

“That’s a good question,” Irving said. “I think I will never write a sequel for a very simple reason. I need to know the ending of my novel before I begin. Not just the ending but the tone of the voice of the ending. What’s happened of major emotional importance. Who the main characters are. Who even the major minor characters are. Where their paths cross. I make a kind of street map of the novel.” He summed up, “I’ve always written the last sentence first and I work my way back.” Hence, “it’s impossible for me to imagine that anything happens after the ending because the ending has meant so much to me that it’s where I begin.”

This is very different from the world of comics, where serial publication rules, and longrunning characters go from one storyline to the next for years, and even decades. In contrast, Irving’s books would be plot-driven rather than character-driven.

But then Irving added something even more intriguing. “On the other hand, here’s what’s comparable to a sequel, and it happens to me . . .unconsciously many times. Characters come back as other characters in subsequent novels. And I don’t even recognize their reincarnation while they’re emerging. It’s only when I finish a book that I realize, ‘Oh, this character is just another version of this character from a previous book.’

He gave examples: “the physical description of Owen Meany, who is first described as looking embryonic, not yet born, was a passage I lifted from the physical description of the orphan Fuzzy Stone. . .in The Cider House Rules. . .” Here’s another: “Why is it Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, Jenny Fields in The World According to Garp, and eventually Johnny Wheelwright, the narrator of A Prayer for Owen Meany, all decide that they’ll never have sex? You know, I don’t know a lot of people like that.” He concluded, “So those are the curses of my sequels.”

As a critic I’m well aware that there are thematic similarities among the works of any writer, and that a writer will tend to endow his protagonists, say, with similar character traits. Irving not only admits the latter, but has found a provocative image for describing the phenomenon. I always admire his acknowledgment of the role of his own subconscious in devising his characters.

A woman from Toronto (Are you noticing how far some people came to attend this event?) asked King, “what kind of scary stories keep you up at night? Maybe your own? Maybe another author’s?”

King said that “I think our idea of what scares us changes as we get older. As a young person, one of the scariest things I ever read was Lord of the Flies, because . . .the idea of those kids turning feral just scared the dickens out of me.”

“Sometimes you get surprised into fright. When I picked up the Harry Potter books, I was not prepared for the depth of some of the frightening passages in there. Frankly, I was surprised by how scary the Death Eaters were.”

“I scared Stephen King,” Rowling declared, beaming with pride.

“Don’t be proud of yourself,” King warned her, in (mock?) annoyance, but it was too late: Rowling was obviously delighted.

A woman from Indiana asked Irving if he ever gets “so involved in a character’s storyline that it affects your personal life?” Irving’s response further illuminated his previous answer about needing to distance himself from his past in order to write about it. In his most recent book, Until I Find You, “it was my childhood, my adolescence, and as much as I had thought I had waited long enough, and that I was old enough to deal with those things, I just remembered a lot of stuff that I would have been happier not to.”

Next was a girl from Pennsylvania, who asked Rowling, “what is the one question your fans have never asked you and should have?” The audience loved this, since it was an invitation for Rowling to spill the beans on some other secret of the Harry Potter saga, as Rowling well realized.

“Oh, God!” Rowling lamented. “How can I answer that? I can think of a couple of things that give away the ending of Book Seven. . . .Having got sixteen years down the line, I kind of feel that would throw it away.” Rowling would not take the bait: “I’m sorry.”

As ever, she tried to explain by way of apology. “You see, people think that it’s all so fixed in my head. It’s not that obsessively plotted out.” (Not like Irving’s books, then?) “For example, this afternoon I believe I changed my mind on the title of Book Seven.” (The audience was audibly aroused.) “Having been quite convinced that I had the title, I suddenly thought, ‘No, that would be better, wouldn’t it?’ in the shower just before coming out here. . . .

“But you know what,” she said, “I’m not going to tell you either version,” and the audience moaned in disappointment. Finally, Rowling had reached the end of her capacity for contrition, although she seemed more defensive than angry, as if asking for understanding from her six thousand pampered children arrayed before her. “Oh, come on! Now really! Have I not given you enough? I gave you Aunt Petunia. I told you Dumbledore is really–” whereupon she drew her finger across her neck in a slashing motion. There’s the chip of ice.

But her goodhearted sense of guilt immediately returned. “So I am trying to give something to you. Anyway, I’m sorry. I suppose it’s that question. Everyone’s really pleased you asked that question. It’s me who’s let everyone down, not you. Sorry.” Perhaps in part to cheer Rowling up, the audience applauded.

To end the evening O’Brien addressed her own question to all three authors” “If you were to have dinner with any five characters from any of your books. . .who would you invite and why would they be on your list?”

“Any five characters from any of my books?” asked King. “Honey, I’m eating alone.”

“You could just invite all the dead ones and then they wouldn’t come,’ offered Irving. (Now, really, there are plenty of good, even heroic characters in King’s books, too!)

“I would eat with Harry, Hermione, and Ron,” King said. “And Owen. . . .I can think of other people’s characters I’d eat with. And I can think of other people’s characters I’d eat.”

Rowling went next: “Well, I’d take Harry, to apologize to him.” Contemplating further, she said, “I’d have to take Harry, Ron, and Hermione.” But then it became clear that she had fallen into another trap. “See, I know who’s actually dead.” Ah, so does this mean that Harry, Ron and Hermione all survive the end of Book Seven, as we all hope?

King urged Rowling to “Pretend you can take them anyway,” whether the characters are alive or dead. “Well, then I would definitely take Dumbledore,” Rowling said. People in the audience called Hagrid’s name, and Rowling acceded to their wishes: “I’d take Hagrid, yeah. And Owen because he wouldn’t take up much space.”

Irving put Dr. Larch, Owen, Patrick Wallingford from The Fourth Hand, on his guest list. He also listed three of his female characters, “Melanie, Hester, and Emma, who would probably burn the house down, but I’d be interested in meeting them.”

Then O’Brien thanked the authors and questioners, King thanked the audience on behalf of the two charities, and the festivities were over. As the lights went up, I discovered I was seated right near a side door that opened directly onto the sidewalk outside, so I was able to make a quick exit without being swallowed up by the thousands who were all leaving at once.

I’m not the only person who took a long time to write about the evening. On Sept. 13 in the diary on her official website (http://www.jkrowling.com/), Rowling started off by apologizing for not writing on it for so long (“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”) Despite her onstage trials, she declared that the shows with King and Irving “were so much fun” and “I would have happily done a third night. . .the crowds, both nights, could not have been more wonderful.” Likewise characteristically, she also “belatedly” came up with the question she had never been asked, and posted it elsewhere on her site (http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/extrastuff_view.cfm?id=23). But Rowling doesn’t answer the question, because apparently it would indeed give away an important plot point.

People have rightly marveled that three authors could draw an audience that filled the vast Radio City Music Hall and that reacted as if they were rock stars. Only afterwards did I reflect that The Music Hall seats 6000 people, but the San Diego Con’s infamous Hall H holds 6500. Ah, but could any Comic-Con guest fill Hall H nearly twice over? That’s what Irving, King, and Rowling accomplished over two nights.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Only a week after the previous session of my lecture series, “1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” I’m doing another one, on Monday, October 2, at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York (www.moccany.org), this time about Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

-Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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