Alumna presents first novel at book signing

Harry Potter-mania extended even to Caren Lissner's book signing and reading Wednesday.

"There's actually a copy of Harry Potter under this podium," Lissner began, referring to the tight security surrounding the new Potter book. "You can win it... it's just an invisible copy, you'll have to trust me."

It was just one of many comments that elicited laughs from the crowd of about 30 that attended Lissner's reading of her first novel at the Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble.

Lissner, a 1993 College graduate with a degree in English, is the author of Carrie Pilby, a novel about a 19-year-old girl who graduates from college only to find that she has no ability to live in the real world, let alone New York City.

So Pilby goes to a therapist, who gives her a list of five objectives she must achieve in order to become more sociable -- including the requirement that she must go on at least one date.

Lissner read from the parts concerning Pilby's experience with a dating service and on one of her dates.

"Leave your Stanford-Binet IQ score," she said as she read from Pilby's dating service introduction. "You may leave your SATs if no Stanford-Binet is on file."

Later, Lissner described the messages Pilby received on her answering machine on the dating service: a stutterer who sounds like he spits when he talks, a normal-sounding guy and an old guy who does "pretty well when [he watches] Wheel of Fortune," answering the IQ request.

Aside from reading from her first novel, Pilby also took questions from the audience.

"You can ask me if it's going to rain this weekend," she said. "Or when the next R7 [train] is arriving at Market East."

Lissner, who wrote a biweekly column for The Daily Pennsylvanian during her time at Penn, also gave some advice to young writers looking to land a book deal, and also described her own experience.

"I sent the first 50 pages to five agents," she said. "Two of them wrote back with some rejections, but also some feedback."

She then worked on the novel and eventually signed with an agent and found a publisher. The book came out within a year.

"It was hard enough to wait for a year," she said. "But for a book to come out, that's a lot of commitment [from the publisher.]"

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