The Author is Dead | Long Live the Reader by Faye Snowden

During the Left Coast Crime mystery convention in San Francisco last week, I had a fascinating conversation with Claire Johnson about her new book, For Thee, (coming, June 23, 2026). It is a fictionalized memoir of Pauline Pfeiffer’s marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Pfeiffer was a fashion journalist from a wealthy, well-respected family who wrote for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Since I already know that Claire is the award-winning author of the Fog City noir series, I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that For Thee won gold in the Florida Writers Association’s Royal Palm Literary Awards.

What did surprise me, however, were the things she told me about Hemingway. I’ve always loved his books; I’m just unfashionable enough to say that he’s still one of my favorite writers. (Don’t judge me.) How can anyone not like Ernest Hemingway’s work? The Old Man and the Sea? I love the part when Santiago asks the boy Manolin, “Sit down. Tell me about the baseball.” For some reason, that line rocked me. (Okay, fine. Didn’t rock you? That’s because you have to do the voice. It’s better with the voice.) Maybe I was so struck by the baseball reference because in the same narrative space as this simple line is an old man who catches a huge marlin only to see his prize devoured by sharks. I don’t care what you say. No one could have seen a twist like that coming.

But the cruelty Hemingway inflicted on his wives, his friends, author colleagues and acquaintances? That floored me. Claire put it this way on her website, “A devout Catholic when she meets Ernest, Pauline rejects the moral tenets of her childhood and faith for a man who ten years later will edit her out of his life with the same casual disdain as he would a badly written sentence.” I can imagine what Floyd Burns, the serial killer character in my southern gothic Killing series would say about someone like Hemingway. He’d call him a scallywag. Billy Ray, the ex-homicide detective turned proud owner of a Creole restaurant would say, “That man ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow him to hell.” They would both be right.

 

Pfeiffer cutting Hemingway's hair.
Those scissors are sharp, right?
All she'd have to do is...never mind.

Hemingway’s behavior was new to me because I’m the type of reader who doesn’t care to know about the lives of my authors. I’ve been this way since I was a teenager. In grad school, when I read literary critic Roland Barthes’ essay, “Death of the Author”, I realized that I had found my people. Here’s Barthes’ hot take: Interpretation should never be based on the author’s intent or her biography or who she is as a person. And the ‘correct’ interpretation of the book can’t be discovered like a treasure hidden inside the author's skull.

Instead, interpretation is the purview of the reader. It’s in the reader’s hands that the work mutates into new life the author perhaps never intended. I’m not talking about one interpretation here, but the varied and many, driven by the experiences and perceptions each reader brings to the text. Once a book is published, the story enters into a conversation the author cannot control. It’s the same as I tell my kids when they try to discipline my grandkids in my house, “This is Ma’dear’s house. You have no power here.”

 

 

All of this brings me to the question of the week, Have readers ever interpreted your message differently than you expected? I can't  answer this question because I don’t read reviews, argue, even in a friendly way, with readers who interpret my books differently than I do. I do believe, however, and this is my hot take, that traces of the writer’s character seep into the text. When Claire spilled the tea on Hemingway, I was surprised. But never once did I think, “Oh, he couldn’t have done that.”  Although I love the powerful simplicity of his work, this reader detects in his books and short stories a stunning lack of empathy. 

In conclusion, Readers, go forth and read, and then tell us authors what we meant. Authors, let go. If this disturbs you, you may comfort yourself by having ice cream for dinner. Ice cream makes everything better. Don’t go as far as Umberto Eco suggests. Just the ice cream. Trust me.