Jami Attenberg was the first writer I met in New York. You can read all about my awkward overtures here, but I think it’s funny that years later Jami still epitomizes the hip, exciting Brooklyn writer to me. She’s hilarious (just check out her tweets), she knows everyone in the lit scene, she’s all about the social media, and she seems to strike out on plenty of adventures (when I met her she’d just driven cross-country, and now she’s moved to New Orleans for a few months).

And, of course, there’s her writing. Jami’s fiction deals confidently with the shifting forms of relationships—and is often, as you’d expect, quite funny. Her first book, Instant Love, is a story collection about three women’s experiences with love and loneliness. The Kept Man features a woman whose husband’s coma causes her to embark on new friendships. And The Melting Season is about a woman from Nebraska who steals her husband’s money and takes off for Vegas. Her newest, The Middlesteins (sweet cover!), will come out this October.

Despite the fact that I unknowingly contacted her during Mardi Gras week, Jami was kind enough to tell me about her most enjoyable readings, her intense experience seeing W.S. Merwin, and the one audience member who wouldn’t stop talking about being in a coma.

• What’s one of the most memorable readings you’ve given and why?

“Oh, you know, anytime I’m doing a group reading it’s infinitely more fun than when I do it on my own. My paperback party for The Melting Season had ten other people reading essays and doing comic strip slideshows and the like, and basically I just got to sit by the side of the stage and drink wine and watch some of the coolest, smartest, funniest people tell some great stories. I’ve always enjoyed The Rumpus events I’ve done too—they’re always packed with a truly engaged audience, and they get really great writers. The How I Learned series in New York has been fun to do too—I almost never read non-fiction, so it’s fun to have an opportunity to do that, and again, the crowd comes wanting to be entertained, and Blaise always gets a fun group of writers to perform. Honestly I don’t know if I’ll ever do another solo reading again if I can help it. I’m flat-out sick of the sound of my own voice.”

• Any particularly intriguing (or conversely, awkward) audience questions that have stuck with you?

“At my very first launch reading for my very first book, Instant Love, an older man in a wrinkled suit asked me what I knew about love. And I had no answer for him! (And probably still wouldn’t.) Also I remember giving a reading at a bookstore north of San Francisco for The Kept Man (which is about a man in a coma) and exactly one person attended it, a shaky-looking man. He quickly revealed that he had, in fact, been in a coma, and he kind of just wanted to talk about being a coma the whole night.”

• What’s a reading that you’ve attended that you’ll never forget?

“A very long time ago, I went to see W.S. Merwin read. This was when I was living in Tampa, right after college, and he was speaking at one of the colleges there. It was in this beautiful auditorium that looms almost church-like in my memory. There was a thunderstorm that night. And the thing that I remember most about it is that he stuttered when he spoke normally, but when he began to read his poems the stutter disappeared. That has stuck with me for nearly twenty years. That this complicated thing straightened itself out because of his writing.”