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Simon Stephenson is a former Pixar screenwriter and an author living in Los Angeles. Set My Heart to Five (Hanover Square Press, September 1, 2020) is his second book.
On your nightstand now:
Sophie Heawood's The Hungover Games, a hilarious and moving account of accidental single motherhood between Los Angeles and London. Highly recommended.
There's also a perennially rotating cast of books I have loved and am digging back into. The current occupant of that spot is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was that kid who had read my way through the children's section of the library by the time I was seven, so the honest answer is that it changed just about every day. But when I began to sneak into the adult section, To Kill a Mockingbird was the book I could not stop reading.
Your top five authors:
The two modern writers I am most in awe of are Jennifer Egan and Colson Whitehead. They are both so consistently inventive and erudite, yet simultaneously readable to the point of being impossible to put down. I think that is a high-wire trick that very few writers can pull off.
Living in Los Angeles, I am forever dipping back into Joan Didion. Los Angeles is her city and California her state. The rest of us just live in it.
John Steinbeck has always been incredibly important to me. A lot of my American friends seem to get turned off him by dint of being force-fed The Grapes of Wrath in high school English class, but I started with Cannery Row--which seemed hopelessly exotic in suburban Scotland--and never looked back. If anything, I have grown to like his journalism even more than his fiction, and his piece on the death of his beloved friend Ed Ricketts--the model for the character of Doc in Cannery Row--is one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever read.
Growing up in Edinburgh as a Stephenson, Robert Louis Stevenson was always going to be important to me, but I could not have predicted just how important. His range was spectacular, and now that I live in California, I find myself retracing his footsteps yet again. (Case in point: when I went to Monterey to search out the ghost of John Steinbeck, I also happened upon a Robert Louis Stevenson museum I wasn't expecting.
If I ever need motivation to work harder, I only have to remind myself that Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days and in fact wrote it twice in that time, having burned the first manuscript after receiving somewhat middling feedback from his wife.
Book you've faked reading:
Anything and everything by Virginia Woolf. I mean, I've tried. How I have tried. I got about halfway through Orlando, and that remains my record.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Ring Lardner's collection You Know Me Al is some of the funniest writing you will ever read. Styled as letters from a journeyman baseball player to his long-suffering friend back home, they were once incredibly popular, but history has somehow forgotten them. No less an authority than Virginia Woolf called Ring Lardner the best prose writer in America, and on this--and this alone--she was right.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Anything designed by Jon Gray, aka Gray318. I am biased because Jon designed the cover for my 2011 memoir, Let Not the Waves of the Sea, but his typographical designs are so powerful, they can pull you into the bookshop from across the street. Fortunately, the books themselves tend to be worth buying too: he was responsible for things like Zadie Smith's Swing Time and the iconic black-and-white cover of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.
Book you hid from your parents:
So You Want to Become an Emancipated Minor? by the Scottish Government Department of Social Work.
Book that changed your life:
On the Road. But only accidentally. Like everyone else, I adored it as a teenager and was convinced that by the time I was 25 I'd be a beatnik writer living in San Francisco. Somehow by my mid-30s, I was a medical doctor living in London and had never even visited San Francisco. So I wrote a movie script about an unhappy doctor who went on a life-changing pilgrimage to San Francisco to search out the haunts of the beats. People liked the script, somehow one thing lead to another and a couple of years later, I was a writer living in San Francisco. So, thank you, Jack Kerouac!
Favorite line from a book:
But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter.
This line from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island really has it: the vanquishing of a murderous villain, Stevenson's hilariously black sense of humor, alliteration, irony and a cadence to die for.
Five books you'll never part with:
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is my perfect escape-for-the-afternoon book.
Adventures in the Screen Trade by the maestro William Goldman keeps me sane in my day job as a screenwriter.
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran is a book I relied on after my brother died. It even provided me with title of my memoir about those events, Let Not the Waves of the Sea.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion is great to dip in and out of and each time I do I feel I come a little closer to understanding this California.
A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Everybody loves Carver's short stories, but this collection of poems--his last--is sublime.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Treasure Island. I can't remember a time not knowing it by heart, and I would love to experience the thrills of the plot without knowing what will happen.