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As a Simpsons fan from way back, I love this thread. But I also love it as a writer, because people will often miss the stuff you obsessed over, but then assign huge complicated layers of meaning to stuff you just did at random/for your own amusement. (And that’s not wrong!) https://twitter.com/joshstrangehill/status/1341121148767981568
I’m also seeing how differently people interpret things based on their own experiences! Like, most of these jokes seemed very obvious to me (they’re just random) but were I better read/versed in film and TV I’d have read a lot more into them, as others have. 
Over the years a lot of people have asked me Qs about the eggs various characters eat in Everything I Never Told You—was I trying to symbolize rebirth, is there a meaning to why Nath dips his egg in salt and pepper before eating it, and the truth is...
...he eats his hard boiled eggs that way because that’s how I eat them. Why eggs? B/c I was so struck by the line in my mom’s (real!) cookbook about “The man you marry will know the way he likes his eggs. So it behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave...”
Then I kept the eggs because in my mind, they represent so much about domesticity and caretaking for these particular characters. But others have drawn a lot of different meanings from them in the novel and I love that—it’s not wrong, either!
Having been raised in a generally Christian environment, maybe the connection between eggs/rebirth (think Easter) was in my subconscious! I don’t know. I certainly think it’s valid to read the eggs that way if it has meaning for you.
And sure, it could be valid to see the mixed salt and pepper as some kind of metaphor for mixing/mingling in this multiracial family. 
(Someone asked me this once.) Even if that wasn’t my conscious intent!
(Someone asked me this once.) Even if that wasn’t my conscious intent!
(Sorry for the examples of my own work; it’s the only one where I could confidently speak to author’s intentions!)
Anyway, authorial intentions are interesting and certainly provide an important layer of context and meaning, but ultimately I do believe meaning is made not between author and text, but between reader and text. Usually influenced by the reader’s own personal experience.
And if a reader finds personal meaning in a text, who am I to say no, that is not it, that is not what I meant, at all?
