On your nightstand now:
Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town by Kelly McMasters
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Growing up in Brooklyn where overdoses and beatings were commonplace, I was desperate for a hole in which I could fall, joyously, rapturously, through. I would've risked not knowing what was on the other side.
Your top five authors:
Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, John Cheever, Tim O'Brien.
Book you've faked reading:
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. But in my defense, I've tried to read Swann's Way (including various translations) at least a dozen times over the past decade. I've finally come to terms with the fact that I might never embrace Proust.
Books you are an evangelist for:
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox and An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Serious Girls by Maxine Swann. The image of two schoolgirls clutching hands, their legs submerged in a pond, their backs flat on anemic grass, their eyes gazing up at a bleached sky, a smattering of red on a uniform (blood?), haunted me. I remember browsing the New Releases section in my local bookstore, and I kept walking by Serious Girls, disturbed, curious. I didn't know anything about the book or the author, but on that particular day, I knew that I wanted to learn more about those two girls.
Book that changed your life:
Drinking, a Love Story by Caroline Knapp.
Favorite line from a book:
"But this, one's death, the whole reach of death, even before one's life is under way, to hold it gently and not feel anger: is indescribable." From The Fourth Elegy of Rilke's Duino Elegies.
Scene in a book that made you terrified of marriage:
The opening scene in Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. We always want our humiliations to be private, yet they are always tragically public, especially in the case of April's theatrical failure, and the fact that we, as the reader, suspect that her husband Frank is privately reveling in it.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.