16 writers who made me a better writer

I could not, would not have written my book without them.

I read a lot of books while I was writing Ambition Monster. Specifically I did a lot of what I call “forensic reading.” This occurred whenever I got stuck. And I got stuck a lot. Writing is the weirdest job in that you’re always alone and you often feel emotionally unhinged and despairing and like nothing will ever work out and you can’t really talk to anyone about it and that’s just part of the process. One day it’s all going fine. The next, you have smooth-brain words amnesia and suddenly forget even the most basic way to string a paragraph, let alone a page.

I’ve found other people’s books help jog my memory. For example, after a big disagreement on how my book should end, a fight I lost and frankly — hi, Kate! — deserved to lose (I wanted to end the book with a dark — but I’d still argue: entertaining! — bummer of an anecdote), I had to write a new ending. I’d just barfed out a 92,000 word manuscript, I had no new ending. In fact, I felt as if I had nothing more to tell. Instead of (or maybe after?) panicking, I spent a few days rereading the ending of every book I own and love, taking nerdy notes and breaking down (in extremely functional and literal terms) how authors land their work.

Oh I see, she wrote an EPILOGUE [looks up definition of epilogue]

Oh this guy ended his with a quote

Ooh a pithy little phrase

Perhaps we close on a question?

You get the idea. I wrote a book about trauma and class and power and ambition and identity and love and sex and heartbreak and rage and the kind of deep, abiding sadness and self-loathing that could drown you if you let it. Here are some of the writers (and their books) that helped me along the way.

Lidia Yuknavitch: The Chronology of Water

I’ve encountered few things in this life wilder, more devastating and viscerally human than Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water. The language is raw/gorgeous/cutting and the prose is perfectly, electrifyingly paced. Each chapter feels like a ride you can’t get off. I read it approximately 200 times while writing Ambition Monster.

Megan Stielstra: The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

I came across Megan’s memoir in essays while I was alone on a writer’s retreat in Iceland, creatively lost, with zero map for my own book, feeling like a fraud. Megan’s a generous teacher and collaborator, a meticulous craftsperson who’s brilliant with writing advice. But there’s also something about her voice that feels so immediate and alive plus clever and funny, like a wink to a close friend. I’ve rarely had a writer light my own brain up like this. Anytime I’m stuck, I reread a few chapters. It works every time.

samantha irby

(all of it)

In my years as an editor, I edited many many writers and —as I’ve often said privately to anyone who’ll listen — not one person turned in a better first draft than Samantha Irby. She’s a singular voice, smart and genuine and warm and insightful all at once. I am never not awed by how hard I’m laughing at anything she writes but also how the jokes never feel forced or cheap. Sam’s written loads of incredible work, but while I was writing Ambition Monster I turned to the sneaky-tear-jerker masked in biting-surface-haha chapters about her family (particularly her description of her father) in We Are Never Meeting In Real Life again and again.

Ashley C. Ford: Somebody’s Daughter

Somebody’s Daughter tore my heart open in a million ways, but it’s the scenes where Ashley describes her relationship with her angry young mom that helped me write my about my own. Her voice is assured but vulnerable, the trauma she writes about is gutting, but each detail is so carefully chosen that it’s never overwrought. The result is tender and open and courageous, like wading hand in hand through life’s darkest waters with a person you’re rooting for, side by side until you reach land.

Jonny Sun: Goodbye, Again

I don’t really know how to describe Jonny Sun’s Goodbye, Again (essays, reflections, and illustrations) except to say it’s subtly genius about ambition, workaholism and loneliness; so relatable and true-feeling that I not only read it four times, I ripped a few pages out of the book and hung them on the wall in front of my desk to try and sort out how he did it.

Caroline Knapp: Drinking A Love Story

I first read Drinking A Love Story by Caroline Knapp when it came out in the ‘90s and I reread it twice while I was writing the proposal for Ambition Monster. I wanted to write an addiction memoir about work and I used Knapp’s propulsive/heartbreaking prose about her alcoholism as a guide.

Carlene Bauer: Girls They Write Songs About

Carlene writes about being a 20-something woman within the culture of early-aughts New York media/publishing so vividly and with such precision it triggered sense memories. This is one of my all-time favorite books.

Deborah Levy: The Cost of Living

Sure, all the books in Levy’s autobiographical trilogy are good, but it’s this one, with its urgency, its woman-in-midlife, almost-feral with survival instinct; its anger and annoyance; its attention to every perfect mundane detail on the path toward liberation that gets me time and again. I carried this book with me everywhere I went for nearly two years.

Alexandra Auder: Don’t Call Me Home

I love a talented old-school raconteur more than I love almost anything and, while Alex has rich material to draw from and a good story to tell — she’s the daughter of Warhol star Viva, spent her childhood living in the Chelsea Hotel — what’s clear from page one of this riveting memoir is she’s sorted out exactly how to tell it. The writing is muscular and fast and imaginative and, even when things start to go off the rails, her voice is always in control. Also, sign me up for any writing about narcissistic mothers, especially when it’s this funny and good.

Jenny Offil: Dept. of Speculation

This is just a favorite book and a kind of writing I aspire to: economical and internal and weird with a breeziness that belies a serious emotional wallop. 10/10 recommend reading 10 times.

Lynn Steger Strong

: Want

Not going to lie, I had just read Lynn’s novel Want when I was first tapped to write the proposal for Ambition Monster — the themes are similar: financial anxiety, craving for more, not knowing how to be satisfied with what you’ve got, a feeling of “is that all there is?” Lynn’s a profoundly skilled and sensitive and unsparing writer and I rolled one particular line of the book in my head over and over and over: “We cannot live outside the systems and the structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them either anymore.”

Hua Hsu: Stay True: A Memoir

This book is quiet and slow but never not emotionally impactful. Hsu lets the details air out, he’s not in a race or rush. I’ve never been that kind of writer (or person) and I loved this book and learned from it too.

Kimberly Harrington

: But You Seemed So Happy

I get Kimberly’s voice as a writer and friend in a visceral way that makes me feel more connected to the world. I blurbed her first book and was an early reader on this one and I still think about a particular scene when she’s rollerskating through the big wonderful old house she and her husband are living in with their new baby, how she perfectly nails the joy and exhilaration and (naive) hopefulness that often comes with brand-new babies and new-ish/before-shit-gets-real love. I referred back to it when describing that period in my life too.

A. J. Daulerio,

The Small Bow

How do we write about being hurt jerks without being too self-flagellating and also not representing ourselves as heroes/letting ourselves off the hook? A.J. knows how to write about being an asshole with the right mix of self compassion and accountability. This is a newsletter, not a book, but I was inspired by it every week.

Christopher Sorrentino: Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir

There’s a section toward the end of Sorrentino’s book that describes the same harrowing scene at least a half dozen times in repetition, he can’t decide which one is best. The result is a pulling back of the curtain on writerly process in a way that — for me — felt intimate and vulnerable and devastating. I love repetition for effect (and probably use it too much) and I studied this scene a great deal when writing a few traumatic episodes of my own.

Isaac Fitzgerald

: Dirtbag, Massachusetts

This is a big-hearted, straightforward memoir and I also sensed — especially from the last lines of the book — that Fitzgerald often felt conflicted telling tales out of school and I did too and I thought he handled stories about his parents generously and honorably while not losing the plot.

Also on the Ambition Monster reading list

Paths to Recovery: Al-Anon's Steps, Traditions and Concepts

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, Stephanie Foo

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Melissa Febos

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Things I Don't Want to Know, Deborah Levy

Women & Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard

The Workaholics Anonymous Book of Recovery

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories, Alice Munro

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collectors of Iceland, Kendra Greene

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love, Nina Renata Aron

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich

Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber

How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, Mia Birdsong

* Head’s up! I am legally obliged under penalty of death to tell you to pre-order my book Ambition Monster everywhere I go until June.