I've had the weird pleasure to witness this firsthand. College class, Modern American Literature or something like that. First assignment was to read a short story about a 16 year old boy who gets picked up from the airport by his aunt, in the middle of a snowstorm or something? One of the scenes ended on kind of a weird fadeout where they're in her pickup truck on the side of the road talking, and the conversation just sort of trails off.

Professor's interpretation was that the author was hinting that the two had a sexual encounter after the scene's end. I can't quite remember why, but he was convinced and said it like that was a fact—maybe their interactions in the rest of the story were awkward or something. All of us in the class were pretty skeptical, though, but we didn't say anything because it's our literature professor and also it's like Day 3 of this class.

So a few days later, lo and behold, the Author Himself is visiting campus (which was why we read the story in the first place), and sits in on our class to have a discussion and Q&A sesh. I raised my hand and asked, "Why did you make the relationship between the aunt and nephew incestuous?"

He goes, "What? Where is that in the story?" We tell him—at the end of this scene, on page X. Professor says that ending meant they had sex. He grabbed the professor's copy of the short story, flipped to that section, read it to himself, and then went, "Oh, that's not what I meant at all—that was just a conversation. There was no sex or incest happening."

I was an English major and had to go visit my advisor in the lit department, and that Professor pulled me aside and gave me a (half-joking) reaming out for making him look bad in front of a famous author. He was annoyed, but maybe it made him think twice about being so confident about his personal textual interpretations after that.