Was there a Girl Canon Tumblr? Circa 2014? I think so, and I’m pretty sure this little literary influcences list was written for it.
1. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. This book made me want to be a writer. I read the mass-market paperback countless times during my teen years. The only other two I’ve read as often: Jaws and Practical Magic.
2. The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. I was an avid reader growing up, devouring The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High and mass-market paperbacks by the dozen, but The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton was the first adult book I bought myself – seventeen, about to leave home for college. I still know many of the poems – “Kneesong,” “The Fury of Rain Storms,” “Barefoot” – by heart.
3. Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block. If there is a book responsible for my move to New York at age twenty, this would be it. For years I wanted purple contacts; for years I dressed as Witch Baby, complete with hand-sewn feather-wings and black roller skates, for Halloween. No one ever knew who I was, but I did.
3. The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles. Tucked into my broken-spined copy of this, a note on a napkin from my first boyfriend that reads, in part: “More simply, you look so fine and beautiful today.” Later, after I’d left that boyfriend behind in California to study in New York, that same copy propped on my knees in NYU’s Bobst, reading it again and again, I found comfort in Odysseus’ journey. We journey, it’s what we do as humans, whether we stray far from home or not.
4. The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson. I consider it a stroke of fortune that this book fell into my hands. I’ve read all of Anne Carson’s early work, and I am enamored of her brilliance, and of her fierceness. You don’t read Anne Carson so much as you surrender to her.
5. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. Though Tropic of Cancer get more attention, Tropic of Cancer is better. This lyric embrace of life and sexuality in 1920s New York swept me off my feet, and the final passages make me swoon every time.
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. There’s not much to say about this one that hasn’t already been said. My favorite Woolf, and I’ll gladly get in that boat with the Ramseys again and again, even if it takes them until the final pages to make it to the lighthouse.
7. Valencia by Michelle Tea. It’s a steamy hot August. I just left my boyfriend of 3½ years and am living on my own again, in an un-airconditioned attic apartment. The girl I have a crush on is reading this. So I am too. Gritty. Claustrophobic. High. Unsettling. And transcendent.
8. Stay Awake by Dan Chaon. A beautiful, uncanny collection. The title story, about a two-headed baby, is especially gorgeous and weird. Are these ghosts stories? Love stories? Both? Either way, Stay Awake is the best kind of haunting.
9. The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr. If you ask me for a book recommendation, this is the one I’ll make. Doerr is a master of what I consider my foremost fascination: the collision of wild and ordinary. He’s also a master of language and a master at capturing the truths of the natural world and our unruly hearts.
10. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I only recently read this war novel for the first time, and it destroyed me. So many of O’Brien’s images remain inside me, circling, circling.
11. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. When I read Geek Love in my early twenties, living alone in an unfamiliar city, that first tenuous year out of undergrad, I fell in love with it. This story of a carnival family (in full display of their cultivated oddities) is irreverent and holy and heartbreaking and weird, and I wanted nothing more than to write a book just like it. Still, I avoided writing, like it was some sort of plague, in the years that followed. I eventually wound my way back to the page, and when I finally applied to MFA programs, this book is the reason I chose Pacific University, so that I could study with Katherine Dunn. Full circle.