Pete Seeger in Bryant Park, with banjo. (Photo: flickr.com/asterix611)

"You have disobeyed me!"

Pete Seeger interrupted co-editor Rob Rosenthal, who was reciting an anecdote from their upcoming book Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words, to scowl out into the crowd and point his finger at a television journalist with his camera on a tripod. "Get to the back." Mr. Seeger repeated this until the man begrudgingly complied and sulked to the back of the sizeable crowd in Bryant Park like a child humiliated by his teacher in class.

The embarrassed cameraman had been warned. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer had been welcomed to the Word for Word reading and signing last Wednesday by a standing ovation from about one hundred fans. Drowned out by the whoops and whistles, the 93 year old was handed a microphone.

"You should all be sitting. Everyone with a camera should stand at the sides. Everyone should be able to see," he said.

Then, just as Mr. Seeger finished ensuring that everybody could see, nobody could hear—all of the microphones lost power.

With a great sense of community (and no acknowledgment of the infamous, apocryphal story of Newport Folk Festival incident, wherein Mr. Seeger was rumored to have pulled the plug on Bob Dylan's recently electrified sound), the show went on and questions and answers were repeated loudly by a chorus of front-row audience members for the benefit of those further back, a la Occupy Wall Street's "human microphone."

Mr. Seeger told the story of how he got interested in music: early, and unexpectedly. "My mother was an extremely talented violinist. She tried to force music on my older brothers and they resisted. When it came to me, she just left instruments around the house and I played with them for pleasure," he said. "By six years old I could bang a tune out on just about everything."

The flaws of the human microphone technique were quickly exposed, however, when Mr. Seeger began to sing. The front rows strained to hear, and the weight of the responsibility for the rest of the audience was heavy, nobody possessing any sense of pitch, tone and tuning able to deliver. One verse ironically began, "I know that you will hear my singing." As sound technicians frantically worked, the crowd grew restless. They had queued for a long time to hear Mr. Seeger, not the city’s worst collaborative karaoke act.

The power returned with enough time for a few questions from the audience, although only children under 10 were invited to ask. Adoring grandparents thrust their petrified grandchildren forward, and a simple response of "Cool" from a young girl after an in-depth explanation of musical influences from Mr. Seeger brought a laugh from the crowd.

Ms. McCain and Mr. Black took questions from the audience about their co-authored book, which analogues the cross-country road trip they took together in an RV, searching for ways to mend the gap between Democrats and Republicans.

Ms. McCain told the audience that the two met while working on a TV pilot that Mr. Black was shooting and quickly became friends. Mr. Black later asked Ms. McCain, via Twitter, to work on a book with him and she agreed.

“He asked Chelsea Clinton and Bristol Palin, but they both said no,” Ms. McCain said facetiously.The book’s underlying premise of the authors' opposing political views resonated at the Q&A session: Ms. McCain was seated to the right of the session’s moderator, author A. J. Jacobs, and Mr. Black to the left.

Ms. McCain is, of course, the patriotic daughter of the Republican senator and former presidential hopeful John McCain, and Mr. Black is a comedian and liberal atheist from the Northeast. What they have in common, though, is the strength of their political opinions, and their criticism of the rigidity of their political parties.

In between answering pointed questions from the audience about major social issues ranging from gay marriage to healthcare reform, Ms. McCain and Mr. Black also shared anecdotes from their trip together, including their experiences smoking weed in New Orleans and shooting guns at Ms. McCain’s home in Arizona.

“I gotta tell ya, if you don’t have a gun, go out and get one. They’re fantastic,” joked Mr. Black, a supporter of gun control.

Ms. McCain and Mr. Black told The Observer that while the book is very upfront and detailed about their journey together, they would not take back or omit anything that is included in the book.

“There were discussions to leave parts of the book out, things that didn’t make us look like the most mature adults the entire time, but they ultimately stayed,” Ms. McCain told us. “I don’t think it would be an entertaining book if we made ourselves out to be perfect people having a conflict-free experience.”

When asked how two people from different backgrounds and political views were able to form such a dynamic relationship, Ms. McCain and Mr. Black told The Observer that they formed a brother-sister type of relationship that worked well for them.

Ms. McCain added that that she and her co-author have “a similar sense of humor that just works.”

“We just give each other a lot of shit,” Mr. Black said.

Rebecca Mead and Janet Groth.

“Twenty-one year flat-line” was the way that Janet Groth, receptionist at the New Yorker from 1957-1978 described her aforementioned career last night at the reading of her memoir The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker at Greenlight Bookstore.

Ms. Groth recounted a time of William Shawn, E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell with a slightly nostalgic but none too romanticized air. She recalled telling the man who first interviewed her for the position that she wanted to write. “Can you type?” was his response. Not professionally, she told him. He reviewed her resume and inquired about a short story prize she had won while in college. “Did you type that?”

During her 21 years at the magazine, Ms. Groth submitted three short stories for consideration—none of which made it into print, and one of which she believes got lost on Mr. Shawn’s desk. “Apparently that happened all the time but I took it very, very personally,” explained Ms. Groth, who is now a professor emeritus of English at Plattsburg State University and the author of multiple books on the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, whose time at the New Yorker overlapped hers.

The reading was followed by a conversation with Rebecca Mead, a current staff writer at the New Yorker who has been there since 1997. “Why write this book now?” Ms. Mead inquired.

“I think the idea was that people had died, who would have been hurt by it,” Ms. Groth responded, garnering a number of laughs from the audience.

Ms. Mead pointed out that others have written about being receptionists at the New Yorker, including Alison Rose, Ms. Groth’s successor.

“That was a very spicy book,” Ms. Groth exclaimed excitedly. “She seems to have gotten around to all those married men I was eschewing.”

Ms. Mead laughed, and went on to call Ms. Groth’s book “beautifully written…it’s really delicious but it’s so sad. I found it ineffably melancholic.”

“It also made me extremely glad that I joined the New Yorker in the 1990s and not in the 1950s,” Ms. Mead remarked, referring to the blatant sexism recounted in Ms. Groth’s memoir.

Yet, there was at least one benefit to working at the New Yorker in the 60s and 70s. “Am I really to understand that the New Yorker paid for your psychoanalysis?” Ms. Mead asked incredulously.

“Yes! You see, they had to have that, or, they thought they did. There were so many of their staff going to shrinks that they had a policy where 80 percent of it was covered,” Ms. Groth explained. “Everybody did! Well, this is perhaps an exaggeration…but it seemed to me fairly widespread.

The back cover of The Receptionist reads: “If Mad Men were set at the offices of the New Yorker Magazine, and told from the point of view of the receptionist, it would mirror Janet Groth’s seductive and entertaining look back at her twenty-one years at that legendary institution.” Yet, Ms. Mead, jumping on the bandwagon of reviewers likening largely unrelated books to Lena Dunham’s HBO series, remarked, “The TV show I kept thinking about while I was reading this was Girls.”

“I’ve only seen the one brief portion that you can watch without signing up for Hulu,” admitted Ms. Groth. “But it looked good.”

“If you had to give your young self advice now, what would it be?” Ms. Mead inquired.

After joking that she should've taught herself how to type, Ms. Groth said that “any assertiveness training” would have benefited her immensely. “Young women are so much better equipped today,” she remarked.

“There might be less lunchtime drinking leading to afternoon weeping now,” remarked Ms. Mead with a wry laugh.

“Oh, I meant to ask: is there anything on offer in the Condé Nast Cafeteria?” Ms. Groth inquired of Ms. Mead, referring to an invitation earlier in the conversation to join her for lunch at the new New Yorker offices.

“You can’t even get garlic, let alone alcohol,” Ms. Mead explained with mock indignation.

“Well, I’ll have to bring a little flask.” Ms. Groth said with a wink.

Ms. Mead noted that there are no longer any receptionists at the New Yorker, as Condé Nast eliminated the positions during a round of budget cuts in 2009. “Does the demise of the receptionist position make you sad, or do you think, well, good, nobody else has to go through it?”

“It does make me sad,” Ms. Groth remarked. “There was a certain humanity about it that lobby security doesn’t quite match.”

When asked whether she still subscribes to the magazine, Ms. Groth told The Observer that she does. “I’m so sorry I lost my gratis subscription, but at some point they economized and all the recent retirees stopped getting their comps. I do get an educational subscription, though. I do love it, and you gotta have it. It’s just vital to the culture.”

Sheila Heti.

Sheila Heti’s new novel, How Should a Person Be?, is dedicated to Margaux Williamson, a main character who is the best friend of the book’s protagonist—Sheila—and, not exactly by coincidence, is Ms. Heti’s best friend in real life as well. Last night, at a launch party for the book at powerhouse Arena, the real Ms. Heti spoke into a microphone as the real Ms. Williamson sat in the front row.

“When I showed Margaux the first draft of this book,” she said, “I thought she was going to say, like, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read.’”

How Should a Person Be has the subtitle “a novel from life,” and it consists, in part, of a compilation of fictionalized emails and interview transcripts. Ms. Heti recounted the experience of showing Ms. Williamson her manuscript in real life, a process that is also documented in the novel. “It’s interesting to have characters that tell you that you did the wrong thing,” Ms. Heti said.

In a sweet but earnest voice, Ms. Heti read from the prologue, delivering a meditation on genius, blowjobs and bagels with an aura of seriousness despite frequent laughs from the audience.

A Q&A followed, and audience members seemed determined to flaunt that they’d already read the book; the novel was published in Canada in 2010, but struggled to find an American publisher. One man prefaced his question by asking, “Are you okay?,” noting that the book contains a great deal of suffering and pain.

“I’m okay,” Ms. Heti assured the audience.

When asked whether she plans to keep writing fiction, Ms. Heti said yes with no hesitation. “I don’t have anything against fiction,” she said.

All of the questions were from men until, someone from the audience shouted, “A girl!” The final question came from one of the audience’s female members (she had not yet read the book) who boasted that she had “a good wrap-up question.”

“How should a person be?” she said.

Ms. Heti looked skeptical. “That’s a good wrap-up question?”

“The book is not called, ‘How a Person Should Be,’ it’s called How Should a Person Be?” Ms. Heti said. She explained that, for her, the questioning of this is more important than any answer could be. The inquirer appeared less than satisfied, and Ms. Heti said, somewhat apologetically, “Well, buy the book!” and hastily concluded the reading, stepping away from the microphone to take a long sip of beer out of a red Solo cup.

“Q&As are so mortifying,” one audience member remarked.

Later, The Observer spoke with Ms. Williamson about her role as a character in her best friend’s novel. “It was very, um, educational. Not just reading the book but also talking for so many hours,” Ms. Williamson told us. “It’s painful but I couldn’t imagine my brain without it right now.”

“When you read about the character Margaux in the book, do you feel like you are reading about yourself?” The Observer asked

“I don’t even remember what’s real and what’s not real,” Ms. Williamson said. “I had never heard any of the recordings and then finally I listened to them and it was right out of the book, verbatim. I completely forgot that was real and it’s hilarious, and it was kind of a joy to listen to.”

Ms. Heti mentioned a similar haziness between the novel and her life. “I think about the book more than I think about those years,” she told us.