Ah, it was a glorious night. Our evening began on March 7 in San Francisco with a sold-out Patrons’ party in an art-filled house that also managed sweeping views of the city and an impossibly beautiful full moon. Afterward, everyone met up at the Cowell Theater on the Bay, where Narrative cofounders Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks introduced Matthew Dickman, Melanie Gideon, and Abraham Verghese. Matthew Dickman joked that he planned to read for a full hour and a half—and no one would have minded if he had. Melanie Gideon previewed her novel Wife 22, which has already sold to thirty countries and been optioned for film. Then Abraham Verghese took the stage to read from his best-selling novel, Cutting for Stone, and to tell the story of how his experiences as a young doctor with AIDS patients in rural Tennessee led him to writing fiction. As columnist Leah Garchik later reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, “While Verghese told his tale, the silence of listeners became more silent. . . . If there’d been coughing, it stopped; if there’d been rustling, that stopped too. In an evening about the power of storytelling, that response told its own story.”
