Pleased to have been invited to the legendary bookstore Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, on Sunday, April 24, 5-6 PM. With Deborah Tannen.

Report: There was a great audience for this, and I enjoyed meeting Deborah Tannen, a land-breaking linguist and the author of “You Just Don’t Understand!” and “You’re the Only One I Can Tell” (among several others), who told me all about her past as a vagabond in Greece. Born in Brooklyn, Deborah has been teaching at Georgetown for thirty-nine years. Before entering her field, she translated a novel by Lilika Nakos from Modern Greek. As one might expect, Deborah Tannen is an acute listener.

I’d met one of the owners of Politics and Prose, Bradley Graham, at the ABA’s Winter Institute in Albuquerque in February and was happy to see him again. Also happy to meet Achilles Rakinas, who wrote me after an excerpt from BETWEEN YOU AND ME appeared in The New Yorker. He is worthy of his hero namesake. And delighted afterward to be reunited with Elaine Showalter, whom I studied with at Douglass College back in the seventies (Women in Literature, the Victorian Novel). Always encouraging, she referred to me (did I hear right?) as her “most famous undergraduate.” A proud moment and a gratifying evening in Washington.