On your nightstand now:
Oh God, I counted 67 books. (I have a nightstand on each side of my bed.) I can't seem to read one at a time anymore. At the tops of various piles are a biography of Diane Arbus, two books of poetry by Dean Young, Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Augusten Burroughs's Dry. I'm on a memoir jag. Tell me true stories; don't make shit up! This is entirely unlike me--I love fiction and poetry. So I feel as though I've gone to the dark side.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first in C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. I read them all, but the first one was like discovering dark chocolate or good sex. I kept looking for the magic door in our house that would let me escape from my family; the closest I got was my parents' closet, where I went to hide from my crazy, violent older brother. I can still clearly picture the electric buffer my dad used for his shoes.
Your top five authors:
Denis Johnson and Lorrie Moore, for their sentences. And Johnson's descriptions of drug use have the power to rearrange your brain chemistry. Dean Young is currently the only poet I can stand to read. By now he probably thinks I'm stalking him, because I keep telling people this. Dean Young I love you! I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and couldn't stop thinking about it, so I'm hoping to get to Remains of the Day soon. I'd never read David Sedaris until recently, when a piece in the New Yorker convinced me he was going to become one of my new favorite writers.
Book you've faked reading:
Insert name of classic here. I have, as somebody once said of (I think) Gore Vidal, "all the deficiencies of the autodidact." I'm stupendously ill-read.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Any book that is passionate, gorgeously written and afterwards haunting. If a book isn't all those things, it is, as Willa Cather said, a cereal box. I want to eat real books.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The first book of poetry I ever bought, Denise Levertov's Life in the Forest. I had discovered the power of poetry but had no idea whom to read, and in this little bookstore in Boston, there was an image of a woman's transparent body among the trees, and it called to me.
Book that changed your life:
Kathy Acker's The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula. It was so far out. It made me realize that I could write whatever I wanted, that there shouldn't be any limits to the exploration of human experience.
Favorite line from a book:
"The residents of Beverly Home made God look like a senseless maniac."--From a story by Denis Johnson. This line really speaks to me since my mother's in assisted living.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Defeating the It--that made a big impression on me. Defeating it with love.