Seward Park Library Shocker !

Date: February 12, 2011
Author: Said Sayrafiezadeh
Venue: Parsons Institute
Neighborhood: Ft. Greene
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 1245673


Open Letter to the Prominent Writer (Said Sayrafiezadeh) I Saw Working at the Seward Park Public Library at 3pm, on Monday, August 23, 2011 after having attended his reading earlier that year.

Dear I Won't Out You (Until Now),

Oh, the shame, the humiliation. For this, I bought your award-winning memoir in hard cover.

Fine, it wasn't a National Book Award or a Pulitzer, but earning a spot on NY Times critic Dwight Garner's top ten list is pretty good, too. And the Whiting, that's not chopped liver, nor are the short stories in the New Yorker.

Betrayed isn't putting it too strongly. For this, I went to so many of your readings that you apologized to me the fifth time I sat through your story about flying to Paris right after 9/11 and not looking very All-American.

And to have to see you like that, in town during the dog days of August, working in a public library where due to cutbacks they have the reference librarians working the checkout desk? Maybe you're not all that? Could that "gifted, young American voice, sure to fulfill its early promise" stuff be hyperbole?

You can see how it calls my whole career as a reader of yours into doubt. What is the point of winning a Whiting, if you are going to work at the Seward Park Public Library, barely clinging to a computer terminal while about 150 Chinese kids wearing their orange day camp T-shirts jostle you?

It was like finding Keith Richards playing in the house band in a Holiday Inn at the airport in Indianapolis.

Is there really no summer writing institute that might have had you for these last two weeks of August? No, Hamptons or Berkshires, intensive memoir program or even one of those NYU summer in New York fiction programs with the wading pools in Washington Square Park?

I mean, in a more just world, the writers one admires should spend August in Tuscany? OK, you missed out on Italy or the Dalmatian coast, with that, I could deal. But do you mean to say you don't have a single friend with a house upstate who could put you up till Labor Day. Don't you want to spare me the spectacle I saw today?